Kotlin is where it's at.
Yes, some of my fellow engineers like it for the language itself, but I feel these days it's getting harder to argue that "the team using Kotlin is so much more productive than the team using Java".
Curious what HN thinks about this.
Kotlin has (real, language-level) non-nullable references, which strikes me as a big improvement.
If you do some long, chained property accesses (which imo are the primary sources of NPEs) I can only recommend mapstruct. You basically declaratively write what has to be mapped to what and it will generate at compile-time the necessary, performant Java code with proper null-handling, even n level deep.
So my empirical evidence is that NPEs ”million dollar” fallen victim of inflation :D
But with Java on a faster release schedule the point of Kotlin gets weaker every day.
Scala on the other hand is more and more a true FP language.
One thing was that while iterating on the build was painful compared to Gradle with Kotlin script it did have very nice performance in combination with remote build cache and I imagine the remote build execution feature could be very nice for large JVM projects.
Yet, when you inevitably have to add something more complex, it will let you do it. Gradle is perhaps one of the most misunderstood technologies, many people believe it is some imperative ant-script, when in fact you have the script write a declarative plan for you, which will be later executed “purely” (much more so than maven for example)