Tonight I did a presentation (slides here) at SeaJUG on Groovy. Things got off to a rough start, due to glitches with the Powerbook. This was the first presentation that I've done with it, and I was unfamiliar with the vagaries of Mac PowerPoint and managing a projector. It all started when I tried to hook up to the projector and was told that the example code was too small in the back of the room. I used 16 point unbolded Courier New, which I've used for presentations before (albeit in bigger rooms and screens). So there was a period of futzing with the display management to get Powerpoint on the projector and then getting the projector resolution to 800x600. Next followed the usual SeaJUG introduction and rituals. After I was introduced I discovered that I couldn't unlock the screensaver -- no matter how much of my password I typed, the dialog only showed three characters. Perfect timing. I just pressed and held the power button. After the machine rebooted, I was able to log in and get going. (Perhaps I need to get a copy of Keynote...)

There were lots of questions, some technical and some philosophical. I tried to just explain the features in Groovy to people as well as potential benefits. There was a group of people that really liked what they saw, and there was a group of people who really didn't like what they saw. I expected this, because to fully buy into Groovy, you have to buy into some assumptions about how software should be developed, which is philosophical bordering on religious. Not to mention that it's a whole talk by itself to do it right.

In addition to the philosophical questions, there were a lot of reasonable and sharp technical questions about various aspects of the language. I wish I had had a tape recorder so that I could have gotten all of them, as feed back for the Groovy development team. On the whole, I felt pretty good about it. I was a little less prepared than I wanted to be, but people didn't seem to mind.

One bonus for the night was getting to meet Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Kellan needed a ride to the meeting so he (and I) hitched a ride with Wilhelm.

Ok, so the news on the Groovy JSR is out, just in time for my SeaJUG talk tonight. Between Tim Bray's comment's yesterday, the Ask Joel thread on Python, Russell's wistful thinking on Java without semi-colons (semi-colons optional in Groovy), and this quote from Guy Steele, I'm looking forward to a lively discussion tonight.