The SpringBoot Language Bias
For the last 6 months, I have openly watched the Springboot advocate, Josh Long, speak about the languages supported by SpringBoot with glee and talk about how much he loved Kotlin and Java. But in all that time, never once did I hear him state one thing about Apache Groovy or provide examples in Groovy except (in all fairness) to wish the language a happy 20th birthday on Twitter.
The Spring Initializer for SpringBoot supports it:
So why is Mr Long (as the Spring Evangelist) so slanted towards Kotlin and Java while ignoring the Groovy community at large? Does Spring have a larger agenda that Mr Long is following?
Groovy vs Kotlin
As of Feb 2023, the Gradle team found that Groovy is 3x faster than Kotlin:
… and Android acknowledged that in their documentation:
But when mentioning this to Mr Long in his Spring Advocacy account on Twitter, he reacted with the following:
This highly aggressive and unusual response is from someone who is supposed to support the Springboot ecosystem and reacted with complete and utter disdain.
Religious Thinking and Programming Bias
So why the bias to begin with? One word. Religion.
IntelliJ created Kotlin and started pushing it. Android adopted it. Gradle felt the pressure and switched from Groovy to Kotlin as a DEFAULT. These are all FINE THINGS. However…
When Gradle showed that Groovy outperformed Kotlin, peoples ‘religion’ came in to view. Mr Long’s acerbic reaction is a classic example of this.
Many people have STRONG EMOTIONAL attachments to languages/tools … I myself am no exception; to say I don’t enjoy working in Groovy would be a lie.
However it is when we allow those emotional attachments to cloud our intellect that we can call this ‘religious thinking’. We have stopped making rational decisions and started make irrational emotional ones.
This is shown above in Mr Longs reaction to Groovys benchmarks; he obviously has an emotional attachment to Kotlin and doesn’t want to hear anything that is counter to what he believes.
Is it just one person or all of Spring?
Spring as a product does not hate Groovy. But people within the organization definitely have their biases as shown by Mr Long (ie @starbuxman ) . Much of the new functionality in recent versions of Java was inspired by Groovy and Groovy is STILL the only JVM language that can be STATICALLY & DYNAMICALLY typed.
The problem here is that advocates are supposed to be representatives and get past their own biases so they can represent/help the community as a whole. Mr Long fails in this regard and has not embraced the Groovy community at all (nor does he want to).
There are plenty of other Spring advocates that are impartial; Dan Vega (@therealdanvega) has no problem having examples shown in other languages and even votes them up:
Still, Change is part of being a developer and learning new tools and new ways of doing things is always expected. There are always tools that will be better than the ones we like (I once used to be a PHP dev back in 2004…blech).
Learning to do things better and to improve should not be met with hatred and anger. That is not what software engineering is about.
