Groovy Encapsulation - Say What?

I'm reading Groovy Recipes by Scott Davis and find this troubling:

class Book3{
private String title
private String getTitle(){}
private void setTitle(title){}
}
def b3 = new Book3()
b3.@title = "Groovy Recipes"
println b3.@title
===> Groovy Recipes

In Groovy, private attributes can be modified, even if you use private setters. That's not cool. I'm hoping there's some way to enforce encapsulation, but it's not looking good right now.

Groovy!

I just finished up Getting Started with Grails the free book from InfoQ by Jason Rudolph. An excellent book. Thanks Jason! I thought it was so good I decided to pay for it (even though it's free) to help support the author and InfoQ. There's a few discrepancies because the book is almost two years old and quite a bit has changed in Grails since then, but I had very few problems working through the examples with the latest version of Grails.

I'm definitely on the Groovy and Grails learning train. Both still seem very promising to me (being a Java guy) and I'm going to continue investigating both. While I set out to learn more about Ruby and Rails this year, the winds have shifted and I'm now focused on Groovy and Grails. I purchased the PDF version of Scott Davis' book Groovy Recipes and The Definitive Guide to Grails.

Hockey Day Minnesota

Today is Hockey Day Minnesota. I'm going to try to honor that by getting my daughters out on the neighbor's pond followed up by taking them to the University of Minnesota Women's game against Bemidji State. It'll then be on to termite practice where the kids will get to play pond hockey instead of practicing. We'll wind it down with watching some of the Gopher and Wild games. It should be a ton of fun!

Code Freeze

I attended the Code Freeze conference at the University of Minnesota on Thursday. It was an excellent local event, especially considering it was an all-day event for only $90. This was the first year I've attended Code Freeze; this year's theme was Maximizing Developer Value. Neal Ford kicked things off and as usual he knocked it out of the park. His topic was On the Lamb from the Furniture Police. It covered the fact that as programmers we're hired to concentrate for long periods of time, yet corporate environments provide the exact opposite affect.

Other speakers included Luke Francl, Nate Schutta, Susan Standiford, Andy Miller and Tomo Lennox. I was very impressed with Nate's presentation, it seemed to directly pick-up where Neil left off. I was particularly interested in Nate's comments about the working of the human brain, as it is an area of interest for me.

I was also intrigued by Andy's presentation entitled "Why I don’t estimate with "points" (and how you too can be delivered from the tedium of repetitive estimation)". Andy and I are currently at the same client working together on a large re-engineering project. I haven't work with Andy for long, but I was very impressed with his presentation and was impressed with his pragmatic approach to estimating. It definitely opened my eyes to new ideas.

Hackers and Painters

One of my 2009 resolutions is to read more. I just finished up Hackers and Painters. I had made it half-way through a couple of years ago and decided to start over and I made it all the way through. A quick and insightful read. Paul Graham is fairly opinionated, which makes for a good read. I've never seen Lisp, but I am very curious if it as good as he claims. Based on my experiences, I definitely agree with his thoughts on development productivity. It makes me that much more interested in learning Ruby and Rails. The last time I worked seriously with a dynamic language was with Perl in college when we were building the Heil X6 SMT's kernel, simulator and assembler. The Heil X6 was the computer we (a team of 6 graduate and undergraduates) built in our ECE 554 Digital Engineering Lab using FPGAs that we had to hand-wire. What a trip!

Groovy and Grails

At the DevJam Jam Session on Wednesday, Mike Hugo gave a presentation on Groovy and Grails. I had heard Scott Davis speak about Groovy and Grails over a year ago and thought it was pretty cool, but back then it didn't feel real. Since then Grails has produced a 1.0 release; put simply I was extremely impressed. Mike is a very good presenter, his slides had very few words and some great pictures. He kept it lively with some humorous slides plus some succinct demos. I've been looking at Ruby on Rails off and on over the last couple of years. One of my New Year's resolutions for 2009 was to really dig into Rails and write a decent sized application. However, after Mike's presentation I began to think that a better investment of my time may be in Grails given that it runs on the JVM and plays very nicely with the Java language. I downloaded Grails yesterday and played around with it a bit. Very nice. Just like with Rails, it's amazingly easy to get a site up and running quickly. Grails is still a 1.0 release, so I have some concerns about it's maturity. However, it runs on the JVM and uses Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh under the covers. Obviously all of them are very mature.

After the presentation by Mike, we entered the Fish Bowl round table discussion, which I believe is the best part of the Jam Sessions. I'm amazed by the brain power in the room at these sessions and I definitely like the Fight Club mentality. The conversation touched on a number of topics including the advantages / disadvantages of statically vs dynamically typed languages. The consensus seemed to be we're definitely seeing a movement toward dynamically typed languages. Someone even dropped the Lisp quote along the lines of Hackers and Painters ("...we could do that in Lisp back in 1968..."), which was interesting given that I just finished the book. One person, who seemed to know a ton about language theory (he even dropped F#), mentioned that he thinks that the gulf between the two is getting bigger and bigger: static languages are becoming more strongly typed and dynamic languages are/will become more dynamic. It makes sense to me given where I see the Java language headed and makes my desire to learn Ruby and Groovy that much stronger.