Groovy
Shares rank 110 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
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.
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.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 47%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good for Jenkins pipeline scripts
“I was pretty happy the day I could move some Jenkins jobs to a Groovy script.”
Comment from 20 Jul 2026 in “Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files” “Groovy is a much better language for defining pipelines than YAML.”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Too powerful, gets unreadable fast
“I like groovy for much the same reason that I liked perl and ruby (to an extent) - but it too is too powerful.”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail” “Groovy gets unreadable very fast, and the editor won't help you.”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language” Untyped with weak editor help
“Groovy gets unreadable very fast, and the editor won't help you.”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language” “What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped.”
Comment from 29 May 2026 in “Gradle Is Javamaxxing” Rarely used for serious projects
“I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)” “Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
All 17 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“led to issues in developer UX (awful stack traces)”
“I like groovy for much the same reason that I liked perl and ruby (to an extent) - but it too is too powerful.”
“I was pretty happy the day I could move some Jenkins jobs to a Groovy script.”
“Java Devs will happily execute your malicious maven/gradle/Grovy/whatever that you push to any public repo”
“Groovy gets unreadable very fast, and the editor won't help you.”
“Clojure, Groovy and even Scala, focus primarily on being nice with Java and having a symbiotic relationship.”
“What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped.”
“Groovy is a real language that, in theory, can have things like syntax highlighting and auto-completion.”
“Groovy is a much better language for defining pipelines than YAML.”
“I liked Grails, just not Groovy.”
“you can install Groovy console and just write code for a concept, execute, crash, fix and go again”
“I liked Groovy, but Kotlin was the better successor”
“Jenkins Groovy is awful and full of footguns”
“Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy.”
“That's solely based on a poor imagination, not trying...”
“I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.”
“each adds its own layer of tooling and conceptual overhead”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.