alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure Kotlin is a hack, but it's growth is directly related to Java not being able to deliver on simple features that would help the day to day lives of developers. So I also can't blame anyone for moving on from the language. I get frustrated with it all the time, especially when Kotlin shows that some feature could work perfectly fine.
Here are some examples that have hit the graveyard: It's been 2 years since exception handling in switch was proposed [0], 3 years since null-restricted types were proposed [1], 4 years since string templates [2], 8 years since concise method bodies [3], and 11 years for JSON parsing [4].
[0] https://inside.java/2023/12/15/switch-case-effect/
[1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099
[2] https://openjdk.org/jeps/430
Sure there are pain points in Java, but I definitely wouldn't want the language to introduce 15 new features each having only a tiny benefit.
Based on your other comment you prefer "fat" languages like kotlin and C# - and that's fair. I find languages with less, but more powerful features far more elegant and while Java has its fair share of historic warts, modern additions are made in a very smart way.
E.g. switch expressions seamlessly support sum and product types, meanwhile kotlin's `when` really is just syntactic sugar.
All in all, with too many features you have to support and understand the complete matrix of their interactions as well, and that gets complicated quickly. And Kotlin is growing towards that.