There’s a lot of excitement about Groovy in my circles. There should be. As has been said elsewhere Groovy could quite possibly replace the Java language as the predominant code-language for writing JVM-running apps. But.

To add a bit of fuel to the fire - and one of the reasons that I’m choosing to look harder at Ruby in particular - is … try running a Groovy script without Java or a JVM. Don’t get me wrong this isn’t so much a knock against Groovy as it is praise for Ruby. One of the things I really like about Ruby is how quickly I can not only code up a prototype of some functionality, but more importantly how quickly I can run it and get the results and try again. In a Test-Driven environment this is extremely important.

With JRuby I even get basically the same kinds of Java integration as Groovy. Indeed this is an exciting time in the development of virtual machines and their support for many languages. Sun is playing catchup with MS’s CLR. But, I just don’t want to be tied to any virtual machine…which makes Ruby just slightly more attractive to (right now).