The state of Groovy and other JVM Languages¶
| groovy | scala |
Well, I like the Groovy language in general. This language has nice pragmatic applications and all other related “cookie”, but it looks like other languages, Scala especially, are more popular or trendy.
Figure 1. JVM language History (image created by zeroturnaround)
The actual motivation was based on the numbers provided by https://libraries.io
Here we have the next numbers projects per language (on Github):
- Golang — 352K
- JavaScript — 232K
- Ruby - 73K
- Java — 44.5K
- Python — 35.9K
- Clojure — 11.2K
- Scala — 10.1K
- C — 5.29K
- Haskell — 4.71K
- Shell — 3.61K
- Groovy — 729 (WTF? What? Why?)
I do not understand why Github has so few Groovy based projects. But, let’s double check these numbers.
About Groovy Language ecosystem¶
If somebody asks you about Groovy the next projects come up to your mind:
Can you name some other “popular” Groovy projects? Well, maybe awesome-groovy can help.
Language Trends¶
Tiobe¶
This language rating is very strange because it’s not aligned with other trends. But, it’s better to have it for comparison. Groovy is 17 , Scala — 32. It’s strange result.
PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language¶
GitHut languages¶
GitHut is an attempt to visualize and explore the complexity of the universe of programming languages used across the repositories hosted on GitHub.
Indeed Job Trends¶
Scala, Groovy, Clojure Job Trends — Absolute
Scala, Groovy, Clojure Job Trends — Relative
Stackoverflow Developer Survey¶
Most Popular Technologies¶
More people use JavaScript than use any other programming language. PHP appears to be falling out of favor as Node and Angular emerge.
Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted¶
% of developers who are not developing with the language or tech but have expressed interest in developing with it
Top Paying Tech¶
Make it rain! Cloud technology pays big bucks. So does tech frequently used in finance. Spark, Scala, Cassandra, and F# top the list of the top paying technologies. (This year’s list looks a lot like last year’s list.)
Trends Summary¶
As you can see Groovy has some issues in popularity. I don’t understand why.
GitHub Repos Analysis¶
Let’s define some baseline for further analysis based on popular Java repos
- JUnit 4 — ☆ 4847, fork 1905
- JUnit 5 — ☆ 419, fork 77
- Google Guava — ☆9108, fork 2109
- Spring Framework — ☆ 8824, fork 7286
Groovy Repos¶
- Apache Groovy — ☆ 1135, fork 409
- Netflix/asgard — ☆ 2091, fork 415 (Asgard is deprecated at Netflix)
- gradle/gradle — ☆ 3483, fork 1374
- grails/grails-core - ☆ 1789, fork 805
- ratpack/ratpack — ☆ 1075, fork 253
- rundeck/rundeck - ☆ 1332, fork 307 (Job scheduler and runbook automation)
- betamaxteam/betamax — ☆ 300, fork 107
Scala Repos¶
- scala/scala — ☆ 6127 , fork 1541
- apache/spark — ☆ 8511, fork 7906
- playframework - ☆ 7855, fork 2726
- akka/akka - ☆ 5504 , fork 1712
- twitter/finagle - ☆ 4614, fork 870
- openzipkin/zipkin - ☆ 3537, fork 493
- scalatra/scalatra - ☆ 1924 , fork 274
JVM Languages¶
- Clojure- ☆ 5310, fork 916
- Kotlin- ☆ 5083, fork 543
- JRuby-☆ 2519, fork 655
Non-JVM Repos¶
- rails/rails - ☆ 31119, fork 12608
- expressjs/express - ☆ 25105 , fork 4731
- docker/docker - ☆ 31206, fork 8874
- kubernetes/kubernetes — ☆ 14371, fork 4319
- github/hub - ☆ 8447 , fork 754
Summary¶
You should make your own conclusion base on this data. I don’t understand why Groovy is not in trend. But numbers show the general picture. Looking forward for your thoughts