alt Hacker News> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?
Because in 5-10 years you'll have a Java project that people can still maintain as if it's any other Java project. If you pick Kotlin, that might at that point no longer be a popular language in whatever niche you are in. What used to be the cool Kotlin project is now seen as a burden. See: Groovy, Clojure, Scala. Of course, I recognize that not all projects work on these kinds of timelines, but many do, including most things that I work on.
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Clojure has never been a popular language, nor has it aimed to be mainstream. That is the Lisp curse. It has never positioned itself as a "better Java". It shines in applications where immutable, consistent, and queryable data is crucial, and it has found another niche in UIs through ClojureScript.
I don't think Clojure belongs there. It was never as big as Kotlin, but it's got great community, longevity and takes backwards compatibility very seriously, and 10 year old Clojure projects seem to be aging at least as well as 10 year old Java projects.
Kotlin has already been around for ~10 years and it's in the TIOBE top 20. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/kotlin/