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Comment by kodebach | Hacker News Reader

What wasn't "good enough" for you in Kotlin?

Sure, Java is slowly getting most of the features and sometimes even in a better form because they control the runtime (virtual threads arguably just work). But IMO Java is still incredibly verbose, Kotlin's type system is just better and I've genuinely never come across anything that would be easier to do in Java. Even virtual threads can be used from Kotlin.

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For me, Java 8 was tolerable. Also used IJ a lot and it hides Java verbosity and reduced a lot of typing. That's why I didn't really see the need to switch. For better or worse, these days I don't even open IJ and just use VSCode + AI Badger mostly to review my changes. Language matters even less.

I don't think Kotlin has fully fledged pattern matching with destructuring yet (like in Java's records) does it?

No it doesn't, but it also doesn't need it. Whereas in Java you write:

  if (obj instanceof Point(double x, double y)) {
      foo(x,y)
  }

Kotlin with its smart cast feature lets you do

  if (obj is Point) {
    foo(obj.x, obj.y);
  }

I would never use the proposed style for Java. This is simpler and easier to understand for anyone with basic knowledge of Java. Readability is more important than fancy features:

if (obj instanceof Point p) {

    foo(p.x(), p.y());

}

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