Yes. Kotlin fans need to understand that Kotlin is not competing with the old Java ways and stop mentioning bloody enterprise as an argument against Java, because bloody enterprise is largely ignorant to Kotlin‘s cause. EnterpriseStrategyAdapter anti-pattern is not a language problem, it is a management problem. It won’t be solved neither by new features of Java nor by new features of Kotlin. The real competition is in the new code in startups and Java has one big advantage there: faster recruiting, more reliability in tooling, better quality of business code for the money. Kotlin is a good perk for developers in late stage startups, where the teams are big, delivery timelines more relaxed and you can afford fancy but less mature language or tool to consume resources instead of delivering more business value.
Also, it's hard to find Java programmers who haven't been tainted by that enterprise mentality, so in a way it makes hiring hard if you don't have the resources to filter the junk. When you see Clojure or Scala on a resume you know they're above that.
Looking at TIOBE and PYPL, it comes that for backend Java and .NET are huge, followed by .Node.js, followed by Python and then PHP.
And when it comes to concurrency Rust is the worst language I've ever used by far. The type checker makes dealing with objects between threads extremely painful. With the JVM it's all just handed for you.
Rust is great when you want a tiny binary with minimal memory consumption.
Remember that "Systems Programming", which is what Golang was designed for, isn't necessarily just Kernel and device drivers, but everything that isn't "Application Programming", and that includes the whole K8S networking and container stuff where it is very successful.
The proof being?
You're delusional if you really think any of this is true. There are, proportionally to "enterprise", extremely few startups using java. For good reasons.
As an average company what you want from a language is: your team already knows it or is fast to learn, it is arguably better in a measurable way (development is faster, codebase is easier to maintain), developers like it more, it has a large support and audience.
How many of these does Kotlin check?
We got to upgrade from Java 8 to Java 17 in 2023.
I have over two decades of experience and there has always been room for trying out the "new" technologies and keeping up with the latest best practices, even in enterprise. I know that not everyone has this experience, but there are actually a lot that happens outside slow big American legacy companies...
In my current startup we use the latest JVM and have a mix of Java and Kotlin. It works really well and we have never experienced any problems with development speed that was related to code or language syntax. JVM + Spring boot + Postgres may be the "boring" choice, but it has enabled us to focus on getting things done and focusing on the product. It didn't take long for juniors to be productive in our stack either. Spring itself looks a bit scary at first sight, but once you learned the basic philosophy you have less issues than a Node project in my experience.
I know that my experience may not match your experience, so I recognize that I can't make a generic statement. It's just a bit frustrating to see similar statements made by people with bad experiences.
- Not all Java development happens in enterprise. There is a thriving eco system of small to middle sized companies and startups using Java
- Not all enterprises are the same. I've actually noticed a shift to the other extreme, where enterprise uses the latest technologies to attract new employees. Nobody who has a choice wants to work with factory patterns on an old version of Java
- Old Java patterns like factories and extreme use of inheritance is out of fashion. There is of course a lag like in any trends, but remember that Java is so widely used so you will always find companies that are slow to adopt, or have legacy software that is in maintenance mode.
I have to keep alternating between startup and enterprise so that I can keep sane but also get pension contributions, so I do know there is a great world out there. Just not always great paid (am in UK).