I spent the better part of 6 months in pure Groovy, getting my feet wet on the JVM, was quite enjoyable to hack around in, the syntax is nicely terse.
The lack of static typing became an issue when I spent 6 months in the underworld (aka Grails in the v1.3 days) attempting to decipher voluminous stack traces whose origins lay somewhere deep in 10 layers of Grails MOP, far from one's reach.
Anyway, I was frustrated with Grails, deeply so; one day on the Grails user group someone mentioned Scala. Had no idea what that was, checked it out, bought the stairway book, started hacking around in the REPL and was quickly sold.
The lack of static typing became an issue when I spent 6 months in the underworld (aka Grails in the v1.3 days) attempting to decipher voluminous stack traces whose origins lay somewhere deep in 10 layers of Grails MOP, far from one's reach.
Anyway, I was frustrated with Grails, deeply so; one day on the Grails user group someone mentioned Scala. Had no idea what that was, checked it out, bought the stairway book, started hacking around in the REPL and was quickly sold.