What's really interesting is Sun's comment in the vote: "
Sun is happy to see Groovy proposed as a JSR. Having additional interesting languages for the Java platform seems like a Good Thing!"
Up to now, Sun was against having multiple "official" languages for the Java platform, despite the actual number of
available languages. This change is a very good sign in the competition with Microsoft's "we have more than 27 languages for the .Net platform". And crontrarily to most of .Net languages, Groovy is more than syntactic sugar.