| Been using Kotlin for ten'ish years. I feel the same, although I'm not part of the Java camp, coming more functional i.e. Scala.
I was working on a number of open source libraries for a more functional reactive Kotlin, but have largely stopped. They really painted them selves into a corner by doubling down on Spring, Micronaut etc. There is little benefit to those and Kotlin. From the back-end side, it's Java light, and Java has largely caught up. If they kept to Ktor, Quarkus, vertx that could compete a bit with the Node/lighter crowd. Or people who limit class usage and focus on a more functional style. But that leads into that target audience... Is not as apt to use Jetbrains projects, ancedotal observation. When I started Jetbrains was heavily used for python, ruby, etc. I converted several teams to Kotlin pre 1.0. But now with VS Code being the primary IDE/Editor, it's a much harder pitch. The multi platform stuff feels half baked out side of UI. Having done several run time agnostic services, I hit so many road bumps. Jetpack compose is really cool though. Where to go? This is an honest question. I just got done a project where we tried to go to Rust, and reverted due to wider difficulty with the borrower system across teams. On another contract I spent several days tracking down node module resolution issues, and incompatibilities between peer dependencies. The script portion of package.json feels lacking compared to gradle and dependent task trees. NRWL/nx and Microsoft/Rush help a bit here. I still feel Kotlin is a really good language, with graal if treated as Node with a better build system. But I rarely see that, mostly it's akin to J2EE or mobile. |
New languages that lose their founder tend to flounder.