[manyxcxi]

I felt the exact same way until last year. Java 8+, IntelliJ IDEA, and Lombok combined massively reduced boilerplate.

Groovy was great for “more than Bash” and DSLs.

I was wrong. Last year we gave Kotlin a try as a team and at this point we’re 100% Kotlin where we would’ve been using Java or Groovy (which would be the vast majority of our code).

Spring and IDE support has made this transition easy. Coroutines are great for the type of code we write, SAM advances in Kotlin 1.4x have removed the last couple “I like the way Java handles that better”. Best off, all of those libraries we already created and use are still completely usable, we didn’t have to rewrite anything.

For me nullability checks by default, synthetic/map backed properties, extension functions, inline/reified functions, and coroutines have so drastically improved the readability AND conciseness of our code I can’t imagine going back.