Having spent most of my time testing on the mainframe, I’ve spent little of that time actually writing command lines scripts for tests (other than some Unix System Services work). Now that’s not to say I’m not completely familiar with scripting since my primary work station has been running Linux for a considerable time.
However, recently I needed to a little more advanced scripting on my Linux machine. So it was at this point I thought “which scripting language should I pick up and use?”. Obviously there’s a decent selection to choose from: Perl, Python, Ruby, Groovy, others (including Rexx).
In the end I settled on Groovy due to my years of experience in writing Java applications, plus Project Zero provides Groovy support.
With my first script in mind I set down to write and learn on the fly. After getting my head around the new syntax I found myself making progress. Also it’s quite nice being able to drop down to the Java syntax and use utility classes that you know to exist and are already familiar with. I know I’m not writing the prettiest Groovy code at the moment, but the way I see it is scripting languages are there for getting things done. And in one afternoon I picked up Groovy, installed the Eclipse plugin for it, and created a working script to do exactly what I needed. I was happy.
I have this niggling thought though… if I get in to Groovy, will it confuse the hell out of me when I go back to pure Java?
