> I want a language that's as versatile as Kotlin, with the ease of use of Go
You can do that today with C# and .NET Core - initialize and build your project straight from the command line with standard tooling bundled with the language (of course .NET Core's tooling is a lot younger than Go's, and in a typical .NET environment you'd be expected to be using Visual Studio or some other IDE, and probably have to deal with legacy projects that depend on old tooling).
https://ttu.github.io/kotlin-is-like-csharp/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/
In some ways Kotlin’s heritage from JetBrains is a disincentive to make this simple, batteries-included build/run/test/deps tool - most language users and the language producers have the IDE itself playing this role.
I hope that as Kotlin multi-platform matures, we’ll see more stand-alone, Unix-y tooling for the language. As is, it seems very challenging to do a Kotlin project without a (JetBrains) IDE handling initial project set-up, Repl, build, run, test, and all the Gradle malarkey.
Technically you can use Gradle from the command line. Gradle isn't pretty though. `gradle init` for a simple Kotlin hello-world application generates 20+ files and folders, which to me is an incredible amount of bloat. Not exactly Unix-y. Agreed about Kotlin being made by JetBrains being a negative. It's a great language, but only working with one IDE, JetBrains', is a trap I'd rather not be in. They seem to be on the wrong side of history with the Language Server Protocol becoming more popular every day.
The fact that you can "go <command>" so many things so easily (build, run, test, etc.) beats almost every language out there. It makes starting new projects really easy. Personally, that's one of the main barriers I feel when I'm trying to start anything in other languages.
Consider Java (or Kotlin, for that matter). You need either a Maven POM or a Gradle build file. Gradle makes things a little easier with 'gradle init', but you're still stuck with arcane build files either way. If you have to use Maven and need any plugins... Good luck with that.
I think the general pattern here is that pretty much every language doesn't stand on its own when it comes to starting and working on a project. You need external build and dependency management tools. Go has it all built-in and it's super easy to use. It's beautiful.
Language-wise, I want a language that's as versatile as Kotlin, with the ease of use of Go. Imagine having a bunch of .kt files and just being able to 'kotlin build', 'kotlin run', etc. That'd be gold.