1.1. The Groovy story

At GroovyOne 2004—a gathering of Groovy developers in London—James Strachan gave a keynote address telling the story of how he arrived at the idea of inventing Groovy.

Some time ago, he and his wife were waiting for a late plane. While she went shopping, he visited an Internet café and spontaneously decided to go to the Python web site and study the language. In the course of this activity, he became more and more intrigued. Being a seasoned Java programmer, he recognized that his home language lacked many of the interesting and useful features Python had invented, such as native language support for common datatypes in an expressive syntax and, more important, dynamic behavior. The idea was born to bring such features to Java.