What happened to Scala? Wasn't that the #1 language for JVM?
(Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things Scala would do differently if it were made today - there's space for a language like Ceylon that makes a genuine effort to simplify on what's in Scala)
Each time someone brings up Scala there comes this weird "people who don't like it are anti-intellectual" - well no, people don't like it because it looks weird, had for the longest time abyssimal IDE support, tries to do things which have been solved in production by itself (see SBT vs Maven) and is a mishmash of more or less every idea that was floating around mixed into one language.
Kotlin has a very specific focus: Being usable for a working Java programmer, who doesn't have three years to learn every weird idea Scala tries to shove down your throat. It uses existing tools, existing Java collections and enhances them instead of saying "well, we do everything new, because we know how to do it 'better' and we don't care for your existing code."
You don't need Scalaz to write Scala code. You can even ignore most of the standard library while you're starting out, and use the Java equivalents.
SBT might seem pointless at first, but the same thing applies there. You don't need to use it, plugins for Maven and Gradle are available. But once you do switch, you'll see how much nicer it is.
The whole "Kotlin comes from industry, not academia. It solves problems faced by working programmers today." is pretty clearly anti-intellectual. I come from industry, not academia, and the Scala type system solves problems I face as a working programmer every day that I couldn't solve in Kotlin (or any other language without higher-kinded types), thank you very much.
> people don't like it because it looks weird
Weird how? I find it looks very much like Python or Ruby.
> had for the longest time abyssimal IDE support
Shrug. Not my experience.
> tries to do things which have been solved in production by itself (see SBT vs Maven)
Just ignore that nonsense and use maven.
> and is a mishmash of more or less every idea that was floating around mixed into one language.
Hardly. It's got a small number of powerful features that get out of your way and let libraries get on with it. Kotlin is far more of a mishmash because it has a whole bunch of special-case functions in the language (e.g. special operators for dealing with nulls, rather than just being a language that people can write an optional type in).
> Kotlin has a very specific focus: Being usable for a working Java programmer, who doesn't have three years to learn every weird idea Scala tries to shove down your throat. It uses existing tools, existing Java collections and enhances them instead of saying "well, we do everything new, because we know how to do it 'better' and we don't care for your existing code."
Scala doesn't shove anything down your throat. You can use the Java collections in Scala if you want - I did when getting started - it's just that it's really valuable to have immutable collection types (actually even in pure Java this is true - one of the reasons Guava is used in almost every project is to be able to have ImmutableList etc. types - but it's better if you can do it without having half the class be "throw new MethodNotSupported()").
> Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible. ... In public discourse, anti-intellectuals are usually perceived and publicly present themselves as champions of the common folk—populists against political elitism and academic elitism—proposing that the educated are a social class detached from the everyday concerns of the majority, and that they dominate political discourse and higher education.
The above sentence fails that test, it merely states its roots and goals can be different from academic pursuits. And it is mostly correct: at best academic work is focused on tomorrow, not today..and at worst it is focused on today but should be focused on tomorrow.