Perhaps 2 of those 3 languages had the purpose to be the best general purpose language, at least for the JVM, but it's a stretch to say the same for Groovy. After the first three yrs of its existence, it's primarily been a business venture with 2 competing conflicting business purposes:
* to buttress one particular piece of software (i.e. Grails) so its project manager can spin a buck selling consulting and conference seats, flipping companies (twice), and take over control of bundled software (i.e. Spring if he hasn't already)
* to keep another project manager in employment by using the Groovy brand to promote himself, diluting control from the technical lead by employing another more compliant programmer, duplicating the functionality of 3rd party addons like Groovy++, setting up a personal website and subscription list to take product control away from Codehaus, etc
Only to the extent Groovy satisfies these purposes does it try to be the best language.
Each language had a different purpose:
* Groovy provided a Ruby-like MOP for use with Grails
* Scala provided lazy-eval functional programming and a higher-order type system
* Clojure provided concurrency constructs and Lisp macros