It's a stretch to say that Gradle actually uses Groovy. Groovy 1.7 added a "DSL" into its parser whereby we could omit parentheses in function calls. Gradle use

It's a stretch to say that Gradle actually uses Groovy. Groovy 1.7 added a "DSL" into its parser whereby we could omit parentheses in function calls. Gradle uses this facility for its CSS-style syntax. In theory, we can drop out of the DSL to add Groovy code (as you can with Leinengen to add Clojure code, etc etc) but in practise virtually no-one does that. I've checked the Gradle build scripts for some large open source projects, even Groovy's own build scripts, and nowhere have I seen anything other than the DSL syntax used. Gradle 2 brought the facility where you could configure a build using any JVM language via an API, and now Java 8 has lambdas I suspect this facility will get used more, and Gradle might even replace Groovy with a custom lightweight DSL for builds not requiring extra programming.