I did use Groovy a lot from around 2005 to 2011 but moved on since then to Clojure for day to day scripting. I'm still trying to create a better implementation of Groovy but one snag of course is the lack of a spec that doesn't change all the time.
I haven't used Grails at all. If your primary use of Groovy is with Grails then your experience of both the language and the community will be quite different.
Yep, most, if not all, of my Groovy coding is for Grails based apps. I'm not really using it for lightweight scripting, nor for dedicated backend-service work.
And while I'm a fan of Groovy, I am still very interested in learning both Clojure and Scala, but I'm too busy with the day-to-day stuff to spend a lot of time on either of those. :-(
I haven't used Grails at all. If your primary use of Groovy is with Grails then your experience of both the language and the community will be quite different.