When I was last at a Java shop, we we're pushing multiple-thousand line PRs every week, a good 40% of those lines were simply boilerplate generated by IntelliJ, and it would have been worse had we not fully instrumented our codebase with Lombok, and all this was for a pretty mature product that wasn't seeing any radical changes from day to day. At the clojure shops I've worked at since, we're building more and delivering product faster, and we're doing it on the JVM with less than a third of the lines of code. A thousand lines of clojure is a significant refactor or a big feature. A thousand lines of java is wednesday.

For me, clojure provides a simple-to-use API, high-level functional abstractions, an instantaneous feedback loop, access to a battle-tested JVM ecosystem, and more than fast enough performance. This is its killer combination, in my opinion. The immutable-by-default data structures are also an underappreciated boon for writing multi-threaded code without breaking a sweat.

> When I was last at a Java shop, we we're pushing multiple-thousand line PRs every week, a good 40% of those lines were simply boilerplate generated by IntelliJ

This actually one of the things I like about Kotlin - many of it features are similar in effect to pre-generated boilerplate - but it lives as part of the run-time, not in your code.

On the flip side, a new version of Kotlin could potentially introduce/reveal bugs - but at least you don't have to deal with four different generations of outdated boilerplate when diving into old code...

The library ecosystem is accessible from the many compile-to-JVM languages.

Half tongue-in-cheek, half serious: not having Java's dev mindshare is actually a benefit.

I don't understand how anyone can stomach Java, especially when Kotlin exists which has the same ecosystem as and better tooling than Java.

Unfortunately companies choose Java for conservative reasons which pretty much rules out anything like Kotlin making a dent in Java's mindshare. Most Java shops won't even upgrade beyond Java 8 so switching to Kotlin is a non-starter outside the Hacker News echo chamber.