As a professional Java developer its new feature pace is still slow. It’s a little better but it hasn’t been fast in a VERY long time.

But that’s OK. They do an amazing job of maintaining backwards compatibility and making things fit in the language well as well as trying to get it right the first time.

Some languages are more willing to remove things that don’t work. Others are willing to have multiple different attempts that all work completely differently every few years.

In many ways that’s just not Java’s style. And that’s OK.

If you want to move faster in JVM world use Kotlin. There is no alternative in .NET world- that’s why JVM ecosystem is much better (and bigger)

I’m actually quite happy with how it’s done, but I know many others aren’t.

F# would be the alternative.

F# is not mainstream lang - it’s more like Clojure for .NET. My point was - you don’t have that variety in .NET as in JVM (Scala, Kotlin, Groovy are all relatively mainstream)

Kotlin is only mainstream on Android because Google says so, Groovy is barely kept alive thanks Gradle, and if it wasn't for Kafka and Spark, Scala would have been long gone.

Hardly any better than F#.

Well you are clearly out of JVM world. See supported langs here https://start.spring.io/ (most popular JVM framework)

Kotlin is especially popular on backend if you can’t jump out of JDK8

F# is functional - by definition not mainstream

I am on JVM world since 1996.

Spring supports anything that can bring them support contracts.

Kotlin, popular outside Android?

Reality check over here,

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

Don’t get me wrong F# seems like a nice lang but definitely not mainstream (non geeks don’t use purely functional langs).

You can’t deny Kotlin is bigger lang than F# by any ranking from those popular (Tiobe) to unknown ones and is build on top of much bigger ecosystem (JVM) - that’s IMHO much more important factor for anyone doing commercial projects.

Additionally there is a big incentive to use it over Java (if you are stuck with older JDK) contrary to using F# over C#

Kotlin as a lang is better than C# (which is normal - it’s newer) and has better default IDE (IntelliJ) than anything on the market.

This is like discussing which homeless has better clothes, while the society doesn't care about both of them.

Well a bit exaggerated. Seen two Fortune 500 companies moving all never stuff to Kotlin on backend on my own eyes (for the reason I mentioned above) in some branches.