I am probably not nearly as young as you think I am....

I cut my teeth programming professionally with C and Common Lisp back in 97/98 and I still use many of the more mainstream languages even today in my professional work. Though before that I was mostly doing Fortran and Common Lisp for data science work (Chemical engineering major). I may not have been working professionally in 94 but I was still programming (mostly data science languages along with C/C++ and Basic). I still maintain a repo in Smalltalk and one in Lua hah.

In my opinion however, I have been fairly fortunate as a professional in that I have been able to pursue whatever I want with whatever tools I want due to being a freelancer/digital nomad. That is mainly how and why I set about learning so many different languages over the years. You name a language that was popular at some point past 97ish and I guarantee I've worked with it (or have tried to) at least once in production. I also consider myself to be language agnostic as a result of this; each of the languages that I know is a tool in my tool belt that can be used based on the use-case of the project.

I absolutely never said I disliked Kotlin (on the contrary, I love Kotlin because it cuts down on the verbose syntax of Java and promotes a more functional design pattern); the main point I was trying to make in this particular post was that because it is so similar to Java, Scala and Groovy (or any C-like really) the intro tutorial series that I made ( for language features rather than projects) was not good content because much of it was mimicking many of the beats from other much better tutorial series that already exist on the web.

I will still continue to make video tutorials of Kotlin projects in the future because I still really enjoy the language and I believe that it is a language that people should be learning if they want to do any kind of mobile development on Android or if they want to work on the JVM at all. (and when the native compiler comes out.... I'm sure you get the point).

I started my YouTube channel to cover less popular languages because I was finding that some of my colleagues and friends were having trouble adopting these languages due to the lack of good clear documentation. Specifically, Elixir and Elm (at the time of making my channel) were seriously lacking real world examples for many of their core features. Even Go (which just picked up speed right after I finished my Go web tutorial), didn't really have great production level examples floating around, unless you were willing to read a bunch of repos and compiler specs. I also really like the idea of doing a "live coding' tutorial series which is how I do most of my videos (intros included) which actually is why the intros became a problem.

Clojure is still a guilty pleasure of mine because I started with CL (and worked with Scheme and Racket) but I also know that Clojure will never see a wider adoption then it currently has due to the fact that it is just so niche. That being said, I can think of tons of grips I have with Clojure like the notoriously bad error messages (without spec) and the slow compilation speed.

Readability is not really a concern for a channel like mine because it is almost always already assumed that you have some knowledge of the syntax and the language going into the tutorials. I did take a little detour from this format to make these intro series for Rust and then for Kotlin (I didn't make them for Elixir, Elm or Go). I will now only be committing to doing an intro series on a language if it is like Rust (has unique features) because I don't want to be repeating myself in content (which in turn would lower the quality of the content). I made some critical errors on my intro to kotlin series that were just silly and unforgivable for someone who has been programming as long as I have and I chalk it up to being not as enthusiastic about the content as I should have been (not because I dislike the language but because the content feels obvious to me).

Maybe that's a little bit of an egotistical stance to take, but it is my channel and I am not really doing it for the money or the views so much as I am doing it because I like to. If I have no interest in the content then there really isn't a point to doing the videos in the first place.

Anyhow, thank you for your comments and I am sorry about the essay.