[yarper]

I'm a professional java dev - groovy definitely does show up on our radar as it's used as the glue for a lot of tools related to our "production" code.

For example gradle buildscripts are groovy, as is the spock test framework.

[vorg]

Groovy is to the JVM what Bash is to Linux. It's used for writing quick and short scripts that manipulate Java classes and for building them, but you wouldn't use it to write actual systems despite the static typing features made available in Groovy 2.x. Use Java or Scala for that. But even Gradle's use of Groovy is in question -- Gradleware just employed one of the 2 Groovy developers who became unemployed after VMWare's Pivotal stopped funding Groovy last month. I suspect Gradleware will get him to replace the Groovy monstrosity with their own lightweight version of the language which does what a build DSL needs and not much more. This could be a reaction against Grails 3.0, a 130Mb download released alongside Grails 2.5 last month, bundling Gradle in an apparent attempt to take control of its distribution channel, in the same way they bundled Spring with Grails 1.0 back in 2008 then got their company bought out by Spring later that year. When a language's development is driven more by corporate maneuvering than providing functionality for a particular purpose then would you even trust it for scripting? Perhaps look at Xtend or Clojure!

You can read the other unemployed developer's take on Groovy's development history at http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/2015/04/about-being-paid-...

[lmm]

Plenty of Java shops use it, but plenty don't. My impression is that most people who are aware of Groovy will also be aware of Scala, whereas there are a lot of Java developers for whom Scala is the only "other JVM language" that they've heard of. But that's just my experience.