Groovy

I had my first use of Groovy, the Java Scripting Language (no, not JavaScript :-) ). It's basically a version of the Java language that sucks less. It feels like a mixture of Java and Ruby.

The language itself is fine - they ripped the verbosity out of Java, and it can access Java libraries - which is both a benefit and a curse as while it offers access to a large library, a lot of the Java API (like the Java language) is a bit verbose at times. Still, groovy has some syntactic sugar that lets you avoid using the Java API at times (especially with JDBC stuff, which is why I was using Groovy today).

If you know Java and Ruby/Python, you'll be right at home with Groovy.