Groovy or Goofy?

JavaPro has an article about a new scripting language for Java called Groovy. Just what is so groovy about Groovy? Beats me.

As best I can tell Groovy is just somones idea of a sneaky way to avoid using a compiler and add a few bits of syntaxtic sugar to the Java language.

The former stikes me as pure laziness and really a problem to be solved by better tools and development environments. As anyone who has ever written JSP can contest, its very easy to be able to write real Java code and have it compiled on the fly without ever thinking about the compiler.

The latter strikes me as just pure impatience with the Java Community Process. As anyone who has used Java over a significant period of time, the language is evolving and as of JDK 2 v1.5 now incorporates some very spiffy new language features such as templates, auto boxing, syntaxtic support for iteratorating collections etc. etc. Ultimately most of these new features are just convenience functions to lessen the amount of code we have to type everyday, and the same can be said for Groovy. The most simple of which is not having to type a semicolon. But you know what? Semicolons are in the language for a reason - they improve parsing of code and error reporting.

Every "clever" little addition that someone threw into Groovy actual helps make it more obscure, confuses developers, increases the number and difficulty of debugging errors, and ultimately just saves a bit of typing. The multiplicity of scripting languages just goes to show that many, many people have thought that they could fix all the problems with every other language, scripting or not and truely get it right. In the end we have as many scripting languages as the world has religions and ultimately the same result - every one of them thinks its "the one" and none of them is actually "the one". If that's what scripting is all about then to be honest I'd rather be using Java or .Net than lazily scripting my way to confusion.