Congratulations, You Just Spent 3 Hours Saving 2 Minutes

Closures, builders, constructs such as these can save you some time, once you learn groovy. 

How much time is debatable, because I don't type a lot even when I'm writing Java. Once I define something in Java it's two characters and control space in the IDE, I never type it again. I don't even type it the first time, usually everything is just named a close variation of the class name, which the IDE does for me, with control-space. But already I digress. 

I just spent 3 hours trying to learn all about closures and builders enough to do some fancy xml that would have taken me 15 minutes in Dom4j. 

The nice thing is that once I learn this, it will save me time typing. Why am I not excited? :)

Persist, I will, but only because I'm stubborn. Eventually I'll be glad I did. I like the language, even if it is one of the least obvious things I have learned in a while.