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I'm a Kotlin enthusiast (since 2013) who has also used Java since 1995 and was quite the enthusiast for many of those years, tracking the progress of Java in detail since inception. I've contributed to both languages. Just so you are aware of my background being strong in both. Now back to this blog post and enthusiastic defence of Kotlin: This blog post wasn't a criticism, it was instead under-informed and misleading. You will indeed attract the attention of enthusiasts if you take an authoratative viewpoint against the thing those enthusiasts care about, publish it publically, promote it to the whole community, and use bad (or no) evidence in the process. Who wouldn't stand up and protect something they care about in that circumstance? By the way, when we were helping to create Java at Borland, we were told many things like you just said: "it will fail", "the CEO/CTO/CIO won't want it", "we can't take the risk", "in 20 years it will be gone", "it's just a toy and not for the enterprise", "dancing Duke is all it can do", "it will fail like the others, Java is no exception", "no real application will be written in it", "it can't do server-side", "stick with C++", "stick with Delphi", "stick with VBA", "stick with PHP" So obviously the prognosticators and non-enthusiasts were wrong. What makes you better are reading the future than they were? Is Google wrong when backing Kotlin? Is JetBrains? Is Square? Is the Spring Team? Is the Gradle team? Is the JUNIT team? Or are these some of the same people who made the right call on Java way back in 1995-2000 as well? In fact Java would have failed had the enthusiasts not carried it through tough times, shaped it up, improved performance, fixed critical bugs, cleaned up bad specifications, and showcased it to the world. Because of enthusiasts, you have Java. So let the enthusiasts do their work of defending a good thing against people that just don't yet see the light (or maybe never will care to, so bet it). |