Groovy Typing, Man

Remy Porter

Computers were a mistake, which is why I'm trying to shoot them into space. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF.

Groovy was one of those programming languages that spent about six months as the trendy language du jour, and I haven’t heard much about it since. If I were to learn it, I’d want to learn by example- going through real-world Groovy code and seeing how it works.

An anonymous submitter has provided one sample for me to learn from:

List<String> items = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(data.split(",")))
String itemOne = items[2].toString()

It reminds me of those Family Circus comics where little Billy would wander the entire city to get from the front yard to the back yard.

It does indeed. And certainly, the type conversions are definitely the long way around: String -> String[] -> List<String> -> String -> String. But more than anything else, it’s the second statement that really gets me.

String itemOne = items[2].toString()

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