There was also beanshell if you remember, of course never as polished nor adopted like groovy but it was also fun to use.

Is groovy actually really "adopted" much of anywhere? I feel like for 99% of normal people, their only real exposure to it is as the DSL of gradle and jenkins.

I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.

Rackspace used (uses?) it.

Rundeck uses it for its plugins. It might be like how people use lua for their main program's dynamic scripting except they know Java so they use groovy.

>I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.

That's solely based on a poor imagination, not trying...

Have to agree with the previous person. Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy. Even with Beanshell I've included it a few times in other projects for basic scripting/customization within the app but groovy? Never in 15 years to now.

I think embedding and testing/plugins/DSLs really is the main use-case. It's a terrible fit for a CLI tool if you've got to wait for a JVM to boot up, especially in a world where people are now used to those kinds of things being instantaneous rust or go binaries.

We use the Spock Framework for testing. It's the best testing framework in the JVM, no joke.