When Java was created in the '90s, James Gosling said that it is intended to be a slow-evolving conservative language that will only pick features from other languages once they have been sufficiently proven to be worth it. We try to live up to that goal and be a last-mover. It's not organisational slowness but conservatism in design that has worked very well for Java. Java will never adopt many if not most of the features Kotlin has, because most features never prove themselves as particularly beneficial over time, and because we try to make the language as minimal as possible, because it's intended for a very wide audience, and, in general, most programmers prefer languages with fewer features to languages with more features.

I'd say Kotlin was Java 2.0 ten to five years ago, but now it's a language that's going in a different direction from Java's.

> The changes outlines in the article are not going to help here I'm afraid.

Not alone, but this is just the beginning.