[vips7L]

No Java teams at my company have moved to Kotlin. There’s a is a shift of Scala -> Java, I think many people are scared of adopting a guest language again and modern Java with records, switch expressions, and sealed types isn’t bad enough to warrant the risk.

[hocuspocus]

Right, especially if you were burned by Scala, Kotlin is even less principled, and lately has grown in complexity, partly thanks to re-inventing several Scala features, only worse.

I also talk to pure Java teams, that never considered anything beyond the typical Java/Spring/Hibernate, they won't even have a look at slightly more modern approaches (Quarkus, Panache, build-time annotation processing and native images) despite jumping on new version of Java rather quickly. They couldn't care less about guest JVM languages.

Roughly speaking I believe that developers who enjoy Scala won't go a lesser language, that looks similar on the surface but specifically takes away what makes Scala special. Then people who dislike it will just stick to the most vanilla Java stack, which benefits from being literally one of the most popular choice on Earth.

Of course there are a few people doing Android or KMP, or who think Kotlin is in the right spot on the backend. But usually they aren't coming from Scala.

[vips7L]

I don't enjoy Scala personally, but I do really enjoy Kotlin. It's a breath of fresh air to Java. WRT to spring -> Quarkus I think that's just a symptom of the teams being on a supported stack that works for them. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with Spring, unless you absolutely need the build time stuff. Thankfully I've managed to convince my own teams to move from Play to Quarkus.