A friend of mine tried Groovy for real work a while back and he didn't seem very impressed with it from a robustness/polish and performance point of view. It ha

A friend of mine tried Groovy for real work a while back and he didn't seem very impressed with it from a robustness/polish and performance point of view. It has to be said that he's a heavily IDE-pampered Java head, so he might have higher standards of polish than you (or I) do. German c't magazine recently did a feature on it and they seemed to like it. Personally, it's a bit too close to Java for my tastes; there are plenty of decent JVM languages out there if that's a strong criterion for you. Clojure's my favourite, but it's absolutely not the way to go if you're not into functional programming.