Like the mythical Cassandra, I occasionally find myself aware of an impending disaster but unable to prevent it. The particular disaster I am talking about is writing verbose, ugly, unclear code in PHP that can be written succinctly, beautifully, and readably in Groovy (or at least one out of those three). This would not feel so ironic, were it not for the fact that I never have quite the fluency with Groovy to actually be able to write the alternative code, and thus I am forced to go with the PHP solution that I know to be suboptimal. A recent case, in particular, has highlighted this fact to me, as I had the task of turning a hash (actually a list of hashes) into a CSV file (actually a string in CSV format), while filtering the hash based on a whitelist of keys. Although this turned out to be implementable in 7 lines of PHP, I was sure it must be a one-liner in Groovy.
