[justthistime_]

In what sense is it closer to Scala? It's more like a slightly nicer Java: All Kotlin code can be translated back to Java (with some boilerplate), but almost no Scala code could be expressed gracefully in Kotlin (or Java).

[jinst8gmi]

Not everything in Scala can be cleanly translated into Java, but Kotlin looks more like a subset of Scala than it does a superset of Java. The syntax is very close.