Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

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For a long time I worked with Java and tried to make the move to Groovy since I could appreciate what I read about it, having a background in Smalltalk. But somehow using Java for some large projects just seemed more straightforward and safe, because of type-checking which supports large-scale refactorings.

But since I moved to mainly work on Node.js I feel that Node.js is what Groovy should have been. A simple but actually powerful language since EcmaScript version 6.

And open.JavaScript feels open because, JavaScript is everywhere, both on the client and now with Node.js on the server too. Everybody knows it. It can not be called "niche language", like Groovy perhaps could. There is safety in numbers.

What I'm looking forward to is Node.js running on GraalVM. That should make it easy to call Java libraries from within Node.js. Use JavaScript as "glue for Java" like it was originally intended.

https://www.graalvm.org/docs/reference-manual/languages/js/

I agree with you about ES6 - very much in many ways it's captured the best of the syntax from languages like groovy without relaxing so much that things become ambiguous etc.

Nonetheless, I find JavaScript still simply isn't structured enough and doesn't have the ability to tap into the underlying strengths of the JVM ecosystem. Static compilation has improved enormously incidentally, which to me means I almost never drop into Java any more where I used to code 50/50 in Groovy / Java.

Mind you, if all you want is ES6 on the JVM, you already have a pretty good subset of it in Nashorn / JDK9. I don't know how well it can use Node libraries though ...

> Use JavaScript as "glue for Java" like it was originally intended.

Then we would have come full circle. JavaScript was originally intended as glue for Java applets, but applets never became popular. Instead, Java was used for standalone and server-side codebases, and Beanshell came along as glue code for those. Later, James Strachan added closures to Beanshell's basic functionality, and Apache Groovy was born. Afterwards, Scala became popular and showed that a statically-compiled language could be used dynamically as well, and Strachan said if he'd known about Scala at the time, he'd never have created Groovy. Later, Kotlin showed you could even have builders in statically-compiled code. Now Graal is finally enabling Javascript on the JVM, perhaps selling the idea to developers better than Rhino or Nashorn did.

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