Java News from Thursday, May 14, 2009

Version 1.6.3 of Groovy has been released. Groovy is a JVM hosted scripting language that "builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk." Think of it as the Edsel of computer programming languages: half-station wagon, half sports car. I tend to prefer languages like Clojure, Scala, and Jython that have a clearer guiding vision of what a programming language should look like, rather than just trying to shoehorn every cool feature they've ever seen into one language. 1.6.3 is a bug fix release.