[shminge]

I'm surprised no one in the comments is mentioning Kotlin. Out of all the languages I've worked with it has been the most enjoyable by far. I agree with the article that there isn't much community but I feel like that's arguably the least important category there. You should definitely give it a shot if you've never tried it before.

[drzaiusx11]

For a while using kotlin as a simply better java "front end" syntax shim increased productivity.

These days java has been "catching up", aka stealing the good ideas from kotlin--so it's less appealing to me. I think where it still shines is in cross platform targeting like ios, android, desktop and server as few other languages really enable that. C# did, but only because of one vendor (Ximian or whatever it was called, some offshoot of Mono)