[mumblemumble]

> And all that just by selling some cheap cut syntax sugar on the corner.

I suppose you could dismiss a lot of what Kotlin adds as mere syntactic sugar. But it also makes some much more fundamental improvements. It provides a much cleaner, unified, object-oriented type system. It provides about as sane an approach to null safety as is possible on the JVM. (Clojure's is arguably better, but I'll concede that nil punning is not for everyone.) And it provides a clean set of core libraries that doesn't have nearly as many friction points and inconsistencies as the core JDK does.

[st3fan]

Clojure has no null safety. You may encounter it less because of the foundational building blocks you use in the language, but NPEs are most certainly there.

[puredanger]

NPEs exist but I probably go months or even years between encountering them. Most Clojure functions are polymorphic on nil and provide safe default behavior. You primarily encounter them when invoking Java APIs via interop.

[mumblemumble]

Same for Kotlin, really. Can only do so much to stabilize things when you're building your home in a marecage.

[antonvs]

There are certainly limits, but null safety doesn't need to be one of them. Typescript does a great job of handling null safety on top of JavaScript.

I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same.

[lemming]

I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same.

Kotlin does do the same. I totally disagree with GP's assertion that Kotlin has no null safety. I use both Kotlin and Clojure and I find Kotlin much better than either Clojure or Java with respect to NPEs.

[pjmlp]

Kotlin now has a new master and needs to decide how much they want to innovate on the JVM or keep the language compatible with ART capabilities and Android libraries.

KMM can only help so much, specially when all the big Java projects are all integrated into stable releases.