[zmmmmm]

I think the "dreaded" category is quite complex and hard to interpret. People can dread a language for a bunch different reasons that aren't necessarily related to the attributes of the language, or even how much it is intrinsically liked. One is a class of language where people run into it incidentally without having any deep experience, but are forced to interact with it, and find it very unpleasant. Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin, but also one of the most dreaded languages, I think because there's a large number of people whose only encounter with it ever is when there's something wrong with their Gradle script that they can't figure out. Coffeescript could be a similar kind of case.

[vorg]

> Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin

Things have changed in the past few years. I would now put Apache Groovy in a different tier than those other two. Kotlin's rise has been at Groovy's (as well as Java's) expense. So nowadays I would rank JVM language adoption as these tiers:

  1. Java
  2. Kotlin, Scala
  3. Clojure, Groovy
  4. others, e.g. JRuby, Ceylon