Dynamically-typed languages became popular in the 2000's decade in the same way visual programming became popular in the 1990's. Programmers and their managers

Dynamically-typed languages became popular in the 2000's decade in the same way visual programming became popular in the 1990's. Programmers and their managers discovered they were more "productive" with them up to a certain scale, so in corporate IT they started being used, especially for web programming where technical debt is generally left to be cleaned up by others. But the trend has reversed back to statically-typed languages over the past 5 years. (Tiobe used to show the trend reversal graph on its front page every month, but removed it recently.) Probably one or two dynamic languages will remain, perhaps PHP and Python, just as VB has lingered from the visual programming fad. Regarding Groovy specifically... It's used for very small use cases, like gluing Java apps together, writing tests for Java objects, basically stuff that won't become a standalone app. Because of Groovy's MOP, it's used for Grails - I don't know much about Grails but its popularity seems to be coupled to Rails' decline. Gradle will be going polyglot soon enough - their Gradle 2 roadmap [1] says they're shifting control of the build from the "Gradle build language" to a configuration-on-demand build model. [1] http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/revolutionary_new_gradle_features_on_the_2014_roadmap http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/revolutionary_new_gra...