> doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? Groovy's changed its direction many times. It was started by James Strachan in 2003 a

> doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? Groovy's changed its direction many times. It was started by James Strachan in 2003 as a better Beanshell, with closures from Ruby and collections syntax from Python added. Its present PMC chair Guillaume Laforge came along in 2004 and changed its direction by focusing on the Ruby side only, translating Ruby's libraries into Java for Groovy, with the intent to build a JVM clone of Rails and chip into its market share. Tech lead Jochen Theodorou in 2005-2006 helped build the meta-object protocol that Grails also uses. Groovy's direction changed again in 2011 when Cedric Champeau duplicated the functionality of Alex Tkachman's Groovy++ addin for Groovy 2, enabling static type inference and compilation, thus becoming a language to compete with Java instead of complimenting it as before. And in 2014 Groovy suddenly branched out into targeting Android. To top it all off, Groovy lost its sponsership and changed it governance only this year, so who knows what changes in direction that will all bring. The backers of the two primary apps using Groovy seem to be at odds with each other, viz, the Grails consulting group at OCI, and Gradleware which employed some of the retrenched developers.