Kotlin sort of feels like Groovy "done properly" (with no disrespect to the authors of Groovy). Groovy kind of evolved in an opportunistic, unplanned manner and ended up with millions of features, cool whiz bang aspects that look awesome that don't always turn out well when you use them on a large scale. Kotlin seems to capture the same ideas (highly pragmatic, maintain perfect bidirectional compatibility with Java),…
I understand the author of Groovy said he'd never have started the language if he'd known about Scala.
And I'm pretty sure if he had known that line would be incessantly quoted as a slur of Groovy every single time it gets mentioned on Hacker News, he would probably have never said it!