If you haven't tried Kotlin, you really should. It's a highly expressive, null safe language with all the goodies you'd want without the bloat of Java. For we

If you haven't tried Kotlin, you really should. It's a highly expressive, null safe language with all the goodies you'd want without the bloat of Java. For web services, Kotlin + Vert.x + Postgres is a beautiful and highly performant thing.