Goodbye, Groovy!

Today is a very sad day. I’ve decided to resign from the Apache Groovy PMC, as well as a committer.

The trigger was that I dared pushing a Gradle Kotlin DSL and this had to be reverted. Lots of people in the Groovy community see Kotlin as a threat. I don’t. I use both languages everyday, for different purposes. I wrote most of the static compiler for Groovy, and I have no problem saying that I believe Kotlin is better as a static language: the experience is more consistent, and very pleasant. But nothing in Kotlin reaches the simplicity that Groovy offers. Running a single line script, the awesome Spock framework for testing, …​

The fact I work for Gradle Inc was also mentioned as a reason why I did push this file. To me, this is questioning my integrity, which is something I cannot accept.

In practice, since Gradle announced a couple of years back that they would start using Kotlin as a language for its DSL, I’ve been in a very complicated position. Privately, I always get pinged whenever I say something good about Kotlin. Like, you should not do this, this is not good for us, or, Gradle is not nice with Groovy, what are you doing. People always make jokes about Kotlin when they talk to me. I was at Gr8Conf Europe a few days after the announcement and man, that wasn’t a pleasant experience.

I am Cédric. I am not Gradle Inc.

I am Cédric. I am not Kotlin.

I am Cédric. I am not Groovy.

Technologies live and die, I’m not interested in being married with a technology, I’m interested in working with something that excites me. The reality is that I’ve been more excited with Kotlin than Groovy lately, and the attacks, conscious or not, public or private, that I get everytime I mention this language are tiring.

Now, when I’m going to say something good about Groovy, I hope folks will believe me.

I want to thank Guillaume Laforge for this adventure. Man, you gave me the opportunity to join the project, its awesome community. You gave me a job, I was lucky enough to be paid to work on open-source software, and that’s all because of you. For that I owe you everything, thank you!

Second, thanks to Paul King. You are the one that the Groovy community should never loose. People have mentioned that I would be a great loss, but that’s not true: the reality is that I contributed almost nothing recently, and you did all the hard work. You are also an amazing person always trying to get the best of us. I will miss it.

Then Jochen Theodorou: thanks to you for all the hard work you’ve done with the compiler. I would not have been able to write the static compiler without your help and insights on the internals of Groovy.

I’d also would like to personally thank folks that make the community vibrant: Søren Berg Glasius, Graeme Rocher, Jeff Scott Brown, Iván López, Álvaro Sánchez and all the others I miss, don’t take it personally, this is not easy for me.

Last but not least, thank you to the Groovy community. You’ve been awesome, and I wouldn’t be where I am without you. I may have been a bit sharp saying that the Groovy community as a whole sees me as a Trojan horse, that’s not true, but the truth is that I don’t want to fight anymore. Do not assume that because I quit the community is toxic: it’s not. There’s just a lot of understandable fear for the future, in my opinion. My advice is, embrace the change, don’t look back, and take inspiration.

I want to say good luck to the team, in particular to its newer members, like Daniel Sun, who are the future of this language: they have the energy, the skills to make it better.

Last but not least, I’m still a friend of Apache Groovy, you should be too!