The thing is that while Scala's main focus is not on being "a slightly nicer Java", it does that job fairly well. There just doesn't seem to be a good point in

The thing is that while Scala's main focus is not on being "a slightly nicer Java", it does that job fairly well. There just doesn't seem to be a good point in using Kotlin, as you can tell from how fast the Kotlin proponent in this thread is changing the frame of reference. - Higher-kinded types? Better compare with Haskell! - Compilation speed? Let's pick Java, the language with the least useful typesystem! - Popularity? Let's compare Scala with Java, but compare Kotlin to Scala! - Commercial backing? Let's conveniently ignore that the language lives by the cross-subsidization of JetBrain's IDE business, instead of relying on the success of their language. Point is, there is nothing that Kotlin does substantially better that would give it a niche between Java and Scala. - Non-incremental compilation speed is not that much faster compared to Scala, and substantially slower than Java. - Most of the things regularly used in Scala cannot be expressed in Kotlin, it only makes Java idioms slightly nicer to write down. - Like in Scala, IDE support is ongoing work. - Compared to both Java and Scala, the ecosystem isn't there. Compared to Scala, Kotlin makes you pay 80% of the cost for 20% of the benefits. I predict that future Java releases will keep cannibalizing Kotlin from the bottom, while Kotlin will fail to attract developers from more expressive languages.