Groovy and Ruby

Date:

I cannot help myself from making a small comment on Rick Hightowers post on Groovy vs JRuby. In short he thinks Sun should support Groovy instead og JRuby, because the syntax is familiar to Java programmers.

To support his case he presents a chart showing language popularity according to job postings. And since Ruby is at the bottom and Java is on the top, Sun should support Groovy. Which by the way is not even on the chart.

One thing I did recognize was this:

Comment on Rick Hightowers Groovy post

Notice that between Java and Ruby/Python there is a wasteland of languages that you will not see running on the JVM in any near future. So if Sun wants to expand the developer base for the JVM (not Java the language), I believe they are making a very wise decision to support the largest languages available to them outside of Java.

Supporting Groovy would probably be popular among the already converted, but Sun has to appeal to new markets to expand the JVM usage. I believe that is what they are doing.