Apache Groovy's worked quite well as the "Bash of the JVM", though other JVM languages have been moving into that space lately. Clojure's also quite good for ru

Apache Groovy's worked quite well as the "Bash of the JVM", though other JVM languages have been moving into that space lately. Clojure's also quite good for running tests -- its macros can easily eliminate clutter in repetitive tests. Kotlin's been chosen by Gradleware as their preferred language for writing Gradle plugins and build scripts. And Scala doesn't really need glue code for tying its classes together because it can do that itself. Virtually no-one's ugraded Grails to version 3 since it came out over 2 years ago, or starting new projects with it. Groovy's adoption is dropping fast, e.g. it slipped out of Tiobe's top 50 a few months ago, and some robot running in Germany is responsible for most of its downloads.