I gave a talk about exactly that recently at Code Mesh. I expect them to post the video soon. https://codesync.global/speaker/ron-pressler/#745why-user-mo...
> Also, this statement makes you sound like Goliath.
Maybe, but it's not just a matter of size but also trajectory. And, as you say, our competition is mostly off the Java platform. My point wasn't to brag, but to put matters in perspective. There are dozens of nascent languages, the vast majority of which will never make it to the top ten, let alone the top five. And while a few of them will, no doubt, one day unseat the incumbents, we obviously don't think of all of them as "threats."
> what are those languages?
The obvious ones. It's not that we don't know that some smaller languages will one day become big, some will even surprise us all, but extrapolating early growth to long-term success is certainly not a good model.
> Like, what are the odds that it took until 201x for you (all) to decide to copy records from ML? You certainly didn't do it before Kotlin for some reason.
As I wrote in another comment, Kotlin's arrival and Java's "boost" are both a response to the same event: Java's decline in Sun's dying days. Once Oracle increased investment, it was mostly a matter of prioritising which features to do first. Records were seen as less urgent as lambdas, so they came later.