Speak for yourself there good buddy. It's pretty important to me!

But I do agree with your broader point. From one perspective, Kotlin has been a great success if we define its mission as a test-bed and laboratory for improving Java proper. Unfortunately, while it has arguably succeeded in that mission, in doing so it might unavoidably fail in another mission, which is to thrive as an independent language.

I'd liken it to yarn and npm. Yarn was a huge success.. at forcing npm to massively improve and thus basically rendering itself irrelevant. A bittersweet success, but a success nonetheless..

I wonder if there's a term for this kind of self-sacrificial project which makes the world better for having existed but doesn't survive the process..