 <p>One goal of Groovy is to have transparent interoperability with Java. Groovy is by design "a Java dependent language with scripting features". However, I don't think that these features are minor - Groovy has many features that are not found in static programming languages (such as Java).</p> <p>To summarize: If you don't care at all about Java, then use a more general-purpose scripting language, such as Python or Perl. If you want to use the Java code-base in a script-ish way, Groovy is a good option.</p>