Programming language adoption is based on politics, not technical merit.
This isn't inherently bad, but is important to remember.
Languages are successful due to the community that rises up around them, far moreso than anything inherent to the design or quality of the language itself.
Which can be correlated, but not necessarily so.
At my company there have been several devs trying to introduce Clojure as well as parallel forays to introduce Kotlin. Overall, Kotlin has caught on and spread much more rapidly and with less effort.
This is not a statement of which languages are "better" given all things equal or what problems each are suitable for, but in my first hand experience it is easier for the average Java developer to pick up Kotlin. Of course we as a company are also cognizant of the IntelliJ lock-in as I suspect using any other editor would run into the same random bugs / autocomplete annoyances that the GP experienced.
There's your politics. Kotlin is succeeding because of it's ties to a very popular Java IDE, so developers already using IntelliJ tend to trust it.
It wouldn't do nearly as well without that built in base of support.
Honestly I feel kotlin doesn't add much to modern java, and if possible I think it's generally better to use the native language to the platform. Probably a reason why kotlin is not that popular on the backend where people can use modern java :)
I think jimbokun statement is 100 percent correct which doesn't mean kotlin is a bad language.
In that case, I hope you won't mind that I'll be ignoring the rest of your opinions on this particular topic.
It's always politics.
A country which would have made different political decisions may have decided to not provide a direct airplane flight, or as good of an interstate road system that makes the drive possible. They may have provided high speed rail instead that could have potentially been better if that’s what the country had chosen.
Me, I like sight seeing. A bicycle ride sounds brilliant. Even though it is much slower.
“Brilliance” is a human attitude towards technology. It is not an intrinsic property of technology.
My experience is a micro-scale observation that it did not take much campaigning to convince developers to try it (given the existing level of support backed by Jetbrains).
Scala’s an interesting case, it rather did catch on.
The reason might be, that Clojure is following a completely different paradigm and people are not willing enough to learn it.
> This is not a statement of which languages are "better" given all things equal or what problems each are suitable for, but in my first hand experience it is easier for the average Java developer to pick up Kotlin.
Yep, I would expect that to be the case.
There is a lot to learn for the average Java only (so far) programmer to really get Clojure.
The similarity to Java, something many developers already know, is an appeal to current popular sentiment. You can advocate the superiority of Clojure's S-expression inspired syntax or immutably data structures or pure functions all you want, most people will just pick something close to what they already know.
This is overly reductive, but here's an example: if you have 3 developers, and 1 will be twice as productive in F# and the others will be 10% less productive, it's probably practical sense to switch, but the 2 developers will resist it, and it may fail for political reasons.
And yet it happens all the time. And the decision is rarely based on anything but a veneer of technical merit.
This is a very serious problem in a production system and it's not a political problem. Having a mixed language system is never as maintainable as a mono-language system, assuming that mono-language is up to the task.
>they leave and now the project has this magic F# part that nobody really knows how it works but everyone knows how to work around.
That's how politics generally works: there always has to be a plausible "objective" reason for something, it just doesn't have to be applied uniformly or even actually true.
I've seen countless migrations to React from other equally capable frameworks because "everybody uses React" it must be the best tool!
I've seen companies picking up Python because if you wanna do ML you gotta use Python, right?
Anybody can write Python, right?
Except now you have a Python codebase written by people that pretend to know Python, while they really don't know how to write a maintainable software program in any language, it just happens that Python is the only language they "know".
And now everything sucks, but at least it's trendy, right?
Programming languages are tools, if you hire someone competent in Ocaml but force them to use Java because "it's more maintainable" you now have two problems.
IMO