[eropple]

I think Go is a disastrous misstep (at least in the system-software contexts where I have to deal with it--obviously, you can do whatever for app languages), but I feel like your points as far as Java/Kotlin go are really well-put. I am honestly surprised at how happy I've been using Kotlin as the baseline server language for my current project (the backend of a fairly intricately orchestrated SaaS). I was not prepared to like it as much as I have; it's still very, very Java, but it blunts the worst parts of it from a syntactic and, where it can, a semantic perspective. Like--List<T> is readonly, but retroactively applied to java.util.ArrayList, similar to IReadOnlyList<T> in .NET. It's pretty nice. I am a Scala person, or I'd like to be but I find I write unmaintainable junk in it; Kotlin provides many of (though not all; I desperately want real traits, interfaces are not sufficient) the features from Scala that I need, without many of the negatives of Scala.

The biggest downsides I've encountered are around the deeper-magic Java interop, with stuff like Dropwizard's HK2 dependency injection system getting a little messy--especially around non-nullable parameters--but that stuff is, all things considered, a small part of the application.