Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.
>The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction
Compared to what? JRuby? Groovy's adoption, from the number's I've seen, walks all over JRuby's.
It's just that the Java world is not fashionable (besides say Clojure) and you don't often hear from the people who use Groovy in their enterprise projects, whereas 10 startups using the language-du-jour can create the impression that it's the hot shit on HN.
That was not at -all- my experience when I went to one in Atlanta. I and one other guy were the only ones in t-shirts; every single other person was in polo and khakis at least, with quite a few dress shirts and suits. Pretty sure it was mostly dominated by enterprise. Admittedly, that was my one and only experience with one; it was sufficiently enterprise-y and uninteresting for me that I never went back.
IME, the strengths were primarily that it was Java+. However, the Java-heavy organizations that might most benefit from it tended to also be the most averse to change. Changing "that much" for "only" incremental change wasn't worth the risk for risk-averse companies. The companies that weren't risk averse tended to try it, but also go outside the JVM altogether when appropriate. So... in a way it was too good at just being a more useful Java, but that wasn't enough for Java-heavy shops.
