The dilemma was always a false choice. You don't need kotlin to get rid of your boilerplate. Java is just a capable of being concise as any other language. Java's verbosity is a cultural artifact not a technical one.

No it is not as capable. The cultural verbosity is only a subset of the verbosity in java. The cultural one is great as those long API names allows for standardized and maximal clarity. The one induced by language syntax is accidental.

https://www.mediaan.com/mediaan-blog/kotlin-vs-java Things like state of the art type inference, data classes and lambda syntax, no semi colon and ton of other things allow for reduced syntactic noise.

Don’t get me wrong. I use java every day and quite enjoy it, but when I compare it to writing in Go or Kotlin, java does sometimes feel a little like meta programming. Especially if it’s a spring app, which is quite common.

This is obviously a matter of taste but I enjoy Java more when I stay away from Spring.

So, technically, you can get rid of a lot of the more egregious clutter with things like Project Lombok.

But I'd argue that, if you need to lean on compiler plugins to do it, it's sort of a rhetorical Pyrrhic victory.

And I would argue that adopting guest languages, alongside the extra complexity that they bring on board regarding extra IDE plugins, more layers to debug (has to pretend to be Java to the JVM), FFI issues (calling coroutines from Java), and creating their own library eco-system is not worth the trouble, beyond some short term feel good.

As long as the platform exists, its main language is the one holding the keys.

Can you describe this a little more. How did the verbosity enter the culture?

Kotlin has sealed its fate turning into Android's main language.

On the JVM its novelty will fade out while Java adopts whatever features might be relevant to the millions of Java developers out there, just like it happened with all other that came before.

And I remember the days back when Groovy was supposed to be the scripting language for JEE, and Spring was going full speed with it as Java alternative, and we even got strongly typed variant.