Yes that's a very strange comment and taints the perspective of the author for the entire article. Kotlin and Scala are also functional or include strong functional abilities, as do many modern languages not on the JVM, so I'm not sure what being "functional" has to do with his omission.
He only considers statically typed languages to be worthy. He doesn't spend much time on Groovy, writing it off as a scripting language. That is my take on why he left it out.
There is a comment from the author that states he hasn't mentioned Clojure because it's FP language. He doesn't go into details bit it looks like he just skipped everything that doesn't support class based OOP. Scala has this feature.
'Loops' was developed at Xerox PARC for Interlisp. Flavors was from MIT for Lisp Machine Lisp. Multimethods were first developed for Common Lisp in CommonLoops around 1986 at Xerox PARC.
He also doesn't mention BeanShell, which there's no excuse for forgetting, considering it was a direct competitor for Groovy, or JRuby/Jython/Rhino, which could be excused for excluding since they're ports of other languages to the JVM.