> Kotlin was designed to replace Java 1.6 and that's about all it's good for.

Not sure what K was designed for. But we use it to fix J's billion dollar "implicit nulls" mistake, and terse syntax (making it useful for templating: Kotlinx.html), and pass-as-value method references. We love it's hang towards immutability.

K is not Haskell, but it sure feels a lot safer that J (where a lot of strings were used to refer to methods, and strings+Groovy was used to do templates).

Bottom line: I'm too old --and life's too short-- for NPEs.