Raises hand Here! I have to work with Spock on a Java codebase and I think groovy sucks ;-)

Yeah I use Spock and Groovy all the time, good god does it suck big ones.

I hate to be "that guy" but ... raises hand.

Spock is also a DSL disaster that's trying to be ScalaTest (https://www.scalatest.org/user_guide/property_based_testing) but in a dynamic language. Every time I use it I have to re-learn the syntax. (I have the same issue with Gradle, so maybe it's just-me?)

My problem with gradle is I never use it enough to get familiar with it, once the problem is solved I promptly forget everything.

It's the perfect example of a bad DSL.

A "DSL" like SQL that you use hundreds of times a year you'll learn the model of.

A DSL like groovy that you use once for project setup (and for that you'll one-off it likely and stackoverflow the rest of the question) is not. And it isn't really natural, it's a bunch of arcane steps that at the end might superficially look a bit consistent, but still really isn't.

Groovy really needs an autocompleter or a generator. Or, well, as you say, you stackoverflow for everything outside the very vanilla basics of it.

But good luck getting the right version match to the syntax you need. Christ.

Having types in Gradle by using the Kotlin DSL, with IntelliJ auto-complete, solves ~80% of that pain.