[xirdstl]

Was it ever popular in SV? No. That doesn't mean no one is using or cares about it.

For my day job, we use Groovy for our Spring Boot app. I love it.

I've also done a lot of Grails development, which I enjoyed also.

[pjmlp]

It was popular in Germany around 2007. All JUGs were doing presentations about Groovy and Grails.

It was even on JEE roadmap to be an alternative language for JSF applications, presented at JSF Days in Vienna.

Nowadays if it wasn't for Gradle, I wouldn't even notice it exists.

[mhd]

I remember those days. Not a lot came out of those presentations, though. It was a lot about Java guys having a bit of dynamic language envy, while having to code with Struts and 1.4 Swing all day. A way of getting that hype and with it some new tech to play with into the enterprise by a backdoor. Which is way too hard to do.

Mobile dev being new, even Java developers get to play with more shiny toys. For good or ill...