The main reason I'm looking for a new language to learn is so that I could understand programming concepts better. I took up electronics in college and then moved to software development, so my foundation in programming isn't very good. That's what I'm trying to change.
I also had three years of electical/electronics in college before I started programming. I have been a java developer for eleven years and just recently started programming in groovy. Both of these are native to the jvm and have extensive apis for client and web programming. The grails framework which harnesses the power of groovy, spring framework, and hibernate is like rails in concept but it is its own. If I didn't know these languages, this would be my next move.
Please correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't Groovy/Grails too similar to Ruby/Rails and Python/Django to make it much of a challenge to learn it? How different is it from Ruby or Python?