A simple (gravity-powered) cat feeder works perfectly well. Unlike dogs, cats are smart enough to eat only what they need. I have to refill the feeder for our 3 cats maybe once or twice a month.

As the person who made this project, I assure you this isn't true.

I have one cat who is a reasonable free-feeder, and another cat who is a food beast and will devour everything in his grasp.

> cats are smart enough to eat only what they need

Could you tell my immense cat about that?

Hah, not all cats! Ours will eat everything that is put in front of it, and then throw up

Not all dogs are fatties. Mine only eats what he needs.

What was wrong with Groovy?

Did you know Groovy was booted off the Codehaus hosting service and its 3 developers retrenched by Pivotal,Inc last January? And Groovy's backup plan to join Apache via its incubator is a hoax, just providing a cover story for a non-technical person to run the show in the background. Virtually all the links at Groovy's page at Apache redirect to "groovy-lang.org", which is privately registered to Registrant Name "Guillaume Laforge" and blank Registrant Organisation. This individual controlling this domain and holding passwords to other non-Apache infrastructure for Groovy is a non-technical person pretending otherwise. Looking at today's emails on the Groovy dev list, we see Cedric Champeau giving two examples of "non code committing" committers, but this Laforge would be a far better example as he doesn't have even one single email in the entire 6-month history of the notifications or commits lists for Groovy at Apache. Until "Apache Software Foundation" is listed as the Organisation, the incubation process isn't real. Even better would be if the technical people who actually built and tested Groovy took over. The only real reason they haven't tried is they know a worse predator lurks over at the Grails ecosystem ready to pounce if Laforge is toppled.

I guess if it wasn't for Google forcing Gradle upon us, Groovy would no longer be relevant.

Groovy's always been good from the very beginning for quick and dirty Java class manipulation, such as test scripts. It found use in Grails when they added a MOP to simulate Rails's ActiveRecord, but Grails is declining quickly -- people aren't starting new projects with it or upgrading to Grails 3.x. Gradle provides it as a configuration language but its typical use is for 30-line build scripts using the declarative DSL only, not the actual language. Gradleware no longer mentions Groovy in any of their promotional blog posts and announcements about Gradle -- it's like they're embarrassed of it -- so I suspect there's changes coming soon in that area.

> Groovy was booted off the Codehaus hosting service

FWIW, codehaus closed down. When was groovy "booted off"?

OK, Groovy wasn't explicitly booted off. But I'm wondering why Codehaus closed down when 5 years ago they were saying Groovy was their most popular project in terms of page accesses and downloads. Weren't the Groovy project team reciprocating the benefits by helping with Codehaus's maintenance?

Why are you so angry ?

You created an anonymous HN user specifically to attack someone's motives instead of discussing the issue of people using the Apache Software Foundation as a cover to hide their effective ownership of some open source software built at other people's time and expense. That's been a common theme from the very people I mentioned.

It was gigantically SLOW from my perspective - was excited when it came out, then noticed it was a magnitude slower for some things.

OK, so if I understand this correctly, a binary format where you can seek to arbitrary positions to read only the data you need to currently display is a huge performance win versus a big blob of text you have to read and fully parse. As someone who has had to uninstall FaceBook from my Android phone due to its poor performance, excuse me if I'm bewildered that they didn't realize this years ago (FlatBuffers isn't the first binary serialization format) and write it that way in the first place!

Facebook(the company) values putting any functioning software out there over putting optimized software out. This is intentional, but it leads to bad experiences for people like you.

There's a lot more to it than just being binary. The big deal is that it can be accessed in-place while still being portable and forwards/backwards compatible. For example, Protocol Buffers is binary too, but requires unpacking, causing lots of object allocation, etc.

I'm sure your billion person social app is killing it due to awesome optimizations baked in from day one. Nicely done.

Groovy allows you statically typed variables also (if you want it).

So the answer would be, it's statically typed by default, whereas Groovy is optionally statically typed. Groovy's static typing can be a little finicky as well, you sort of really need to only use it optionally because using it everywhere gets kind of painful (although it might be better in the most recent versions, type inference is quite hit and miss).

But then I would say there are a lot of other advantages that Groovy brings - just a wider usage and knowledge base in general mainly.

Edit: Gosu also seems to offer reified generics, I'm not sure how that is implemented, esp. while maintaining the seamless Java interop people speak of, but it could be pretty powerful.