[specialist]

Kotlin (Ceylon, C#, Nice, Boo, Groovy, etc) isn't better. Just different.

What I want, as a devoted Java partisan, is a Java (Oak) experiment do-over. More more and less less. A fantasy hypothetical effort I call Encore™.

What are the sources of programming errors? Engineer them away.

What causes the most boilerplate? Engineer those away.

I've got a laundry list that I've collected over the years. Maybe I'll scrub it for publication.

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One specific, novel feature of Kotlin that is better, and should be swiped for every other OO language, is its automatic generation of the canonical object methods (toString, equals, etc).

Data classes are dumb though.

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/data-classes.html

[smichel17]

Why do you think data classes are dumb? The only thing I think they're missing is an automatic method to serialize to JSON or other text format, eg, so they can be easily stored in an android preference.