Groovy creator says he'd never have written Groovy if he'd had Scala

[Julian]

Groovy creator James Strachan writes:

"Though my tip though for the long term replacement of javac is Scala.
I'm very impressed with it! I can honestly say if someone had shown me
the Programming in Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill
Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy."
http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

What is the view of this community to comments like this? Given that
Scala doesn't yet have enterprise support (unlike Groovy with Spring)
is Scala ready?

Or will you just contentedly trundle along with Groovy?

[Paul King]

I think it is a case of horses for courses. For power users (like
James) there are some things
that Groovy does better and other things that Scala does better, so
select the language that
best suits your needs. These days, Polyglot programming isn't too hard
to do, e.g. Grails
supports Groovy (obviously), Java, Scala and Clojure (so far).

For the huge wave of Java users looking for Java 7 like features now
and who want the
maximum new features with minimum learning curve, I think Groovy has
some enormous
positives. As hard as I try, I can't see Scala being able to capture
that wave over the
next 5 years. After that, perhaps ... if Groovy sits still.

Note, you should also read James' subsequent blog entry where he clarifies that
he was really only talking about static contexts in the first
contraversial article.

Cheers, Paul.