Back in the days when Kotlin didn't exist and even Scala was in its infancy, some people genuinely liked the JVM ecosystem and even aspects of Java itself, but

Back in the days when Kotlin didn't exist and even Scala was in its infancy, some people genuinely liked the JVM ecosystem and even aspects of Java itself, but were turned off by the verbosity of Java. Those were the people that started using Groovy and also projects such as Grails (especially since they saw the success of Rails and Django and wanted to emulate that). Also, I guess some people genuinely like gradual typing, although I've never found much use for it. Nowadays, I wouldn't pick up Groovy anymore, but there was a time where it was basically that, or Java (or a different ecosystem entirely; or something like JRuby / Jython).