Comment by cataphract

I see where you're coming from, having used Groovy for a few years (in Grails, mostly) but I think you're also overstating your case.

Groovy is very quirky, and it's good at turning compile errors into runtime errors (@CompileStatic negates many of its advantages like multiple dispatch) and making IDE refactoring less effective. But the again, so is Spring. This got better when Java configuration was introduced... and then came Spring Boot, which is a super leaky abstraction, with default configuration that automatically backs off depending on arbitrary conditions (!). And yet people find it valuable, because it reduces boilerplate.

These days, I use Groovy mostly in testing (and Gradle), and it can really make tests more expressive.