Boilerplate is a problem but doesn&#x27;t make a language harder to understand. Language-level shortcuts to reduce boilerplate generally make the language harder to understand, IME (I&#x27;m thinking of e.g. Perl&#x27;s $_).<p>I actually agree that implicit conversions are to be minimized. But you do need a way of doing the equivalent of the magnet pattern - which in Kotlin is either a different language-level feature, or simply impossible. I&#x27;m hopeful that a simpler underlying abstraction can be found - but Kotlin feels to me like it&#x27;s just piling on a bunch of special cases without making any effort to be consistent or unified.