I think Kotlin differs far too much from Java — I don’t want all those plus features that will inevitably branch too far from the JVM/Java corresponding code, becoming its new thing.
I might want a nearly-Java language that only adds trivial syntax sugar, but are otherwise the same. Groovy sort of had a good initial idea here (being a superset of Java, though again, it has grown apart a bit since).
For me Kotlin lives in this weird limbo between these two extremes. If I want a different language on the JVM I would rather do Scala or Clojure.
I wouldn’t really leave behind the JVM ecosystem, which is much bigger and better quality than the .NET one from what I gathered (though it is still good and bigger than most other languages’). And other people’s code is the numero uno productivity boost, so it’s an important area.
I think I would be fine with a smaller ecosystem. I've seen a lot of projects that have made bad choices in libraries because there are too many. Sometimes I feel like if there was just one blessed jdk way it would be a lot simpler. Honestly, the only thing that is keeping me from .NET right now is async/await. Pron really did Java a service by pushing for virtual threads.
Kotlin is great, but it is a fairly heavy dependency if all you want is extension methods. Java has mostly caught up in many other aspects, so I'm experimenting with Java + one or two compiler hacks. Checked exceptions are my next target...
I'm curious about how you plan to work on checked exceptions.
If it's just about ignoring forced exception management, Lombok provides the @SneakyThrows annotation.
I would need something more before I add a new type of extension. Maybe if you could solve the null-check issue.
i.e. rewriting
var x = a.getFoo()?.getBar()
to
var x = a.getFoo() != null ? a.getFoo().getBar() : null
In that case I may consider it for my personal projects, and then potentially recommend it at work once it becomes more widespread and has IDE support.
I don't know yet. I'm already using some of my own variations of sneakyThrows, but what I really want is just to disable the whole damn thing in the compiler (checked exceptions are a compiler feature, not a JVM feature). I won't be changing the Java syntax though, sorry!
