Groovy's being heavily promoted behind the scenes by its handlers at VMWare, everything short of paid adverts. It's been sitting in the 40's on TIOBE constantly

Groovy's being heavily promoted behind the scenes by its handlers at VMWare, everything short of paid adverts. It's been sitting in the 40's on TIOBE constantly since 2007, sometimes higher, sometimes out of the top 50, but hasn't had any consistent uptake since then. It's main use case was with Grails, but like its "inspiration" Rails, Grails is on the decline. Groovy's original use was as a dynamic language with closures for scripting Java classes, but there's now many other options like Clojure where you can define a 3-line macro to eliminate some repeating code that can't be done with a function. Its backers have tried to use their Groovy distribution channel to ship other addons such as DSL syntax (2009), a parallel processing library (2011), static typing and compilation (2012), and (soon) an Android version, but like when this trick is pulled with other software from elsewhere developers aren't biting. Gradle 1.x used Groovy for its DSL syntax, but Gradle 2.0 removed virtually all Groovy code from its internal codebase, probably an indicator of their future plans regarding Groovy. Overall, use Groovy * if you're still using Grails * for quick scripts that your certain won't need to scale * in Gradle but stick to the DSL syntax