tl;dr - ignore this. just musing over syntax and features. the best argument as to why Kotlin should not include things like collection literals, collection comprehensions, and java's ternary operator (kotlin's if/else is far superior) is that kotlin is currently a very easy-to-read language. not excessively verbose, and lacking many operators that only someone familiar with the language would understand (e.g. the aforementioned). however, compare them to the elvis operator

?:

which i think is intuitively designed. at the very least are collection literals not equally or more-so imminently understandable? My only issue is what container symbol to use?

<>

,

{}

,

[]

,

()

already have distinct uses. while square brackets are the only ones that don't support multiple fields, and thus they would be prime candidate, I really hate how easily confused indices vs elements already are. sorry for wall of text. thoughts?