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Comment by driver733 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but you have take into account that Android devs are limited to Java 6, most enterprise devs (based on my experience) are still on Java 8 and some are still on Java 5 or below.

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Yeah this is nonsense and isn't an argument against the language. Embedded devs aren't allowed to use Rust, does that mean we shouldn't compare C++ 20 to Rust? Does that mean Rust is a bad language? If these said devs are limited to Java 6/7/8 does their company have the inertia to use a brand new programming language (Kotlin) that their devs don't know? Does this mean Kotlin is bad because they're not using it?

This is a bad argument.

My goal is to compare Kotlin with the current version of Java along with any Java libs that are commonly used (such as Lombok). I have mentioned the fact that some teams are still on older versions of Java just to highlight that not every developer can access the features of the latest Java release.

Unless it's Android, if they can't access the latest features of Java they more than likely can't access the latest features of Kotlin either.

That's not always the case, since Kotlin can generate Java 6 compatible bytecode.

It's a bad case of jvm and lib dependencies and do reflect badly.

You can compile Kotlin to target any of these JVMs, so of course it's relevant. If you're limited to using Java 6 every day, Kotlin is a game changer. If you can target Java 13, less so.

Then you should really name your article "My Arbitrary Choice of Java versions That I Believe People Use vs. Kotlin".

Java 9 was a huge roadblock for upgrading since a lot of libraries were using internal apis and that mess took a few years longer that it should have.

Now the only supported Java version is 11, so a lot of companies have moved to 11 the last year.

Might as well call this a comparison of Kotlin and an arbitrary old version of Java then.

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