That comment is from a newly-created anonymous user responding with the word "personal" to a roll of facts and figures by someone who's real name and photo can be found by following the user link. If anyone (even someone anonymous in HN tradition) wants to challenge the facts I presented, present other relevant facts (not speculations on motives), and show how a different conclusion can be drawn, then I'll happily reply to them. I believe the Grails consultants at OCI will try and take over Apache Groovy, DataStax-style, irrespective of my own personal feelings on Groovy.
I'm a lurker and created an account. I have worked with Groovy/Grails for the past five years at multiple large corporations as well as one state entity (both employment and contract work). I was actually surprised on how many companies use it. Also, I have never heard anyone with such a negative response to it. You can take off your tinfoil hat now.
I've never worked with Grails, but used Groovy a lot from about beta-10 to v1.8, though have since moved on to other languages, even trying to bring Groovy-like ideas to those ecosystems, most latterly Go.
I'm positive about Groovy's widespread use for builds and scripts on the JVM, similar to the way Bash is used on Linux. It doesn't get used much for building actual systems, even though some of Groovy's project managers tried to repurpose it for that. I've long had concerns about Groovy's governance, and believe that's the reason for its problems, e.g. Pivotal, OCI.