[utbabya]

There are a lot of nice things I enjoyed when I was still working with Kotlin extensively. Null safety, data class, sealed class, exhaustive when, top level functions, object class, higher order function, extension functions etc. They fundamentally change the way dev think, producing safer, lighter and more maintainable code.

Contrary to the popular notion of dismissing certain syntax differences as sugar, I consider it one of the most important factors simply because we spend more time reading than writing code. To me Java has always been verbose and dreadful to read, there's something fundamental wrong if you need your IDE generate so much then force to train your eyes to skip over most of them while reading.

I find Kotlin to be more elegant and fluent especially with native syntax support of the above features. I can read it at least 25% faster than Java. Perhaps which one is better is personal taste, but I'd maintain syntax is very important, just like natural languages.