After getting tired of Java's verbosity in 2008, I switched to a Ruby job, where I was fortunate to work with an incredibly talented developer and Ruby expert. It was a joy coding in Ruby after 4 years of Java and XML.
After that, I moved to Groovy, which seemed like a nice middle ground between Ruby and Java, or as I called it at the time: Java as it should have been.
I don't hear much about Ruby and Groovy lately, and while I focused more on front-end development, my back-end work rolled back into Java, which, I admit, has gotten slightly less painful with Java 8. At least in some ways; in other ways, it's just become an even bigger mess where some parts are sensible while other parts are dragging the weight of decades of poor choices with them.
I hear Kotlin is nice, though.
My Ruby skills have gotten a bit stale, sadly. The last thing I did with it was in 2013 I think, when I ran into trouble with Ruby's handling of unicode.
Java may suck to some, but it pays huge chunk of corporate salaries. Although there is the best of both worlds: JRuby! Scripting JMX and some heavy JDBC stuff with Ruby saved me so much time.
They've been overtaken by Python and Kotlin, respectively, as developers' first choice of programming language. Kotlin even runs on Android and natively, whereas Apache Groovy is limited to the JVM.
> I ran into trouble with Ruby's handling of unicode
Ruby's developed mainly in Japan, and Japan's the last holdout in the world against the widespread use of Unicode.
After that, I moved to Groovy, which seemed like a nice middle ground between Ruby and Java, or as I called it at the time: Java as it should have been.
I don't hear much about Ruby and Groovy lately, and while I focused more on front-end development, my back-end work rolled back into Java, which, I admit, has gotten slightly less painful with Java 8. At least in some ways; in other ways, it's just become an even bigger mess where some parts are sensible while other parts are dragging the weight of decades of poor choices with them.
I hear Kotlin is nice, though.
My Ruby skills have gotten a bit stale, sadly. The last thing I did with it was in 2013 I think, when I ran into trouble with Ruby's handling of unicode.