I’m not one who values languages based on number of features alone (otherwise C++ or C# would be my all go), but based on the synergy of them. I think in this case, Scala is a really elegant language with many features that all come from some simple to understand primitives, for example everything is an object, that creates a highly coherent language.

This is in contrast with Kotlin, that tries to gain popularity by including many features, but always feeling “just sugar syntax over Java” to me.

> Kotlin is strictly worse if you value language features above all else. In that, there are several (several!) features it doesn't have.

Could you please elaborate on that? It was my understanding that Kotlin did everything that Java did (or any JVM-based language) but actually added first-class support for basic features missing from Java that required magic sauce like Lombok to fill in the gaps.

Kotlin has more language features than Scala. It just manages to do less with them.