[jillesvangurp]

"Just syntactic sugar"

That's what most modern programming languages provide. Syntax matters. Kotlin offers a lot of syntactic sugar for things that are a bit verbose in Java.

The new structured concurrency stuff in Java is actually a great example of that. More or less does the same thing, Kotlin manages to do it with a nice Kotlin DSL. Java does it with a lot of builders and function chaining. Which is a lot less readable.

In the end, Java caught up and you can now use this for more complex concurrent/parallel code (both should be possible with this, like it is with co-routines in Kotlin). Which is a good thing.

[gf000]

Didn't mean to say that syntactic sugar is bad. But when Java touches a language feature they prefer doing it only when absolutely necessary and even then having the biggest part be in the runtime if possible. E.g. in the lazy case, it's backed by runtime optimizations, they are treated as proper constants. A fancy getter over a lambda is not the same thing, and that's all syntactic sugar in this case would give you.