Completely different motivations, and I suspect Kotlin is a reason that Clojure and Scala seem to be losing much of their initial steam. Clojure offers Lisp on the JVM, but what most people really wanted was a fixed Java. That's exactly what Kotlin delivers. Clojure has decent Java interop, but there's a serious impedance mismatch working with native Clojure and Java libs. Kotlin otoh dogmatically sticks to Java's model of programming, just a cleaned up version.