# Groovy

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Groovy and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Dynamic JVM language liked for Jenkins pipelines and quick scripts that beat YAML. Critics find it hard to read, untyped and weakly supported by editors.

## Why people recommend it

- Good for Jenkins pipeline scripts (2 comments): "I was pretty happy the day I could move some Jenkins jobs to a Groovy script." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983438)) "Groovy is a much better language for defining pipelines than YAML." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909701))

## What people warn about

- Too powerful, gets unreadable fast (2 comments): "I like groovy for much the same reason that I liked perl and ruby (to an extent) - but it too is too powerful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249930)) "Groovy gets unreadable very fast, and the editor won't help you." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401174))
- Untyped with weak editor help (2 comments): "Groovy gets unreadable very fast, and the editor won't help you." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401174)) "What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319794))
- Rarely used for serious projects (2 comments): "I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148438)) "Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148925))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Groovy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/groovy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).