I’ve been using Groovy quite a bit and I really like it. It’s a JVM language so I can use Java stuff but it’s Perly enough to warm the Perl hacker bits of my heart. The other day I heard an interview with Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, on Software Engineering Radio and it’s made me very excited to learn it. I’d heard of it but was into Groovy so I didn’t get too far beyond having heard of it. It’s looks extremely powerful and exciting though. This is a small presentation but it’ll give you a bit of the flavor. For more info, I really encourage you to listen to the Odersky interview. It’s technical but still a good overview, with good explanations of the features and functional-programming things it uses.