I started to learn C++ once, had semester and couldn't wrap my head around the object oriented part. At some point I looked at learning objective C on my own, though I didn't really use it. I had a 1000x better understanding after an hour.
I learned it while at the same time learning (or really enhancing my previous knowledge of) javascript, thanks to an insane mostly-Finnish app development platform known as Qt Creator, which for no rational reason uses C++ for the under-hood-stuff and javascript for the UI front end. Just an absolutely horrible mismatch of mental states. For bonus points, the company that I worked for that used this monstrosity for its suite of apps got purchased by a huge west coast company and the apps were shut down and everybody was fired, after two years of my working on this shit.
Something like ruby is a pretty quick way to get up and running with something easy and object-oriented. Groovy if you already have a jvm running (though ruby might be easier depending upon your background)
I would assume so. Grails basically died to SpringBoot (which I thought was sad from years ago as I thought grails did some things better), but I mainly have worked in Go for the last 5 years and a lot of PHP and Java in the 5 before that (then Grails, J2EE, Perl, ASP (pre-dot-net), etc. before all that).