Groovy: yet another JVM language

In case you still think there’s nothing wrong with Java, take a look at Groovy. It’s not Groovy itself that shows what’s wrong with Java, so much as the fact that people have gone and created yet another JVM-based language. I’ve been using BeanShell a bit over the past few days, and it certainly makes some things easier. From what’s described on their wiki, I do think that Groovy will make things easier still, which is the whole point of such a language.

Personally, I’d like to see the Java language evolve to have a bit more useful syntax. They can keep their cherished static typing, but add convenience syntaxes for dealing with hashes, named method parameters, making it easy to pass methods around, etc. If they’re not going to do that for Java, I’d then really like to see Eclipse support something like BeanShell or Groovy.

It would be nice if the Groovy site mentioned the status of the Groovy language and compiler. BeanShell is quite mature and ready to use in projects. Is Groovy?