Groovy became a clone of Ruby within 2 yrs of its creation, what with similar closure-based functions, the meta-object protocol, the paren-less DSL syntax. The overall syntax is different, being like pre-version 8 Java's, and it must run on the JVM, but besides that Groovy (and Grails) are just clones of Ruby (and Rails). Heck, their names even sound the same, that's because their business purpose is to steal x% market share from Ruby & Rails.