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I know that the University of Oslo started on a rather big Groovy project, but after a few months ported everything over to Ruby (not sure if it runs on JRuby though). As far as I remember, they felt that Groovy was a terrible "clone" of Ruby: Long and Java-ish backtraces, small community and much broken code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomasfl worked on the project, so maybe he'll chime in with more details.

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I'm not at a startup (anymore... we got bought), but we're using Groovy for unit/functional testing.

It's a nice compromise when you want something that cuts through boilerplate with metaprogramming/duck typing but can keep tight interop with Java where you need it... and you need a quick learning curve for Java devs.

That said, stack traces are horrible, debugging in Eclipse is difficult to impossible depending on how "dynamic" you get, there's no interactive debugger like pdb.set_trace() (that I know of) and the flexibility of the syntax can get out of hand quick. Great for limited use, like making mini-languages and glue for testing. Wouldn't want to support a large application written in it.

Groovy also has a faster static version, Groovy++ at http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest which can intermingle with the more scripty Groovy code using annotations.

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