Death to Groovy provoked some heat on DZone:
I get that it's supposed to be funny, but what's really so bad about Groovy/[sic]
I based this comic on James Strachan's blog "
Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?" In that article, James says:
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.
This is great material for a comic, and based on the amount of chatter this blog generated, I recognized a great opportunity.
Rejected IdeasI had a few other ideas for this comic:
- The first frame originally showed Wolf reading James' blog. He reads it to David, and David says "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?". Wolf responds: "Time machine!". I played with this for quite some time, but it always had too many words.
- Show an angry mob of Groovy programmers chasing James. Angry mobs are always funny, but I didn't have a punchline. With Groovy in particular, it seems like people are very sensitive about perceived criticism towards Groovy.
- Wolf could go back in time and convince James to never create Groovy in the first place. This is a more direct interpretation of James' blog, but less funny. This is exactly what people expected.
- Building on the previous bullet, Wolf could go back and prevent Groovy, but then his time machine could blow up. At this point, David would remind him that his time machine was programmed using Groovy, so preventing Groovy is impossible due to the paradox.
Jelly?Before Groovy, James created an XML-based scripting language called Jelly. Nobody really likes Jelly, and James himself
apologized for Jelly:
For those who are increasingly forming an aversion to all those angle brackets in our lives as J2EE developers - myself included - I hereby humbly apologise for Jelly :). It seamed such a idea at the time, honestly! :)
In the end, I had Wolf go back and prevent a made-up language called Peanut Butter. We can only assume that Peanut Butter was a really bad language. You should not mess with the space-time continuum. Although James never did invent Peanut Butter, he went on to invent Jelly.
The TitleThe title "Death to Groovy" was the first thing that came to mind, long before I had the Peanut Butter and Jelly idea. In its original form, Wolf was indeed going to show James the Scala book, and ultimately kill Groovy.
But the Peanut Butter concept made me laugh, and I decided to leave the title alone. I think it's a great title, because it accomplishes several goals:
- it is provocative
- it sets you up to assume the time machine is designed to kill Groovy, which makes the ending far more surprising
- it's fun to rile up the angry Groovy mob
