@yole - While I respect and fully understand all reasons - keeping in mind that most arguments are made several times over, my question to the Kotlin designers and JetBrains Team is a very simple one.
The Kotlin stack of technologies relies heavily on a Java stack. Even though some clever people are designing Kotlin specific api’s that surpasses the Java counterparts in syntactical sugar etc - it is clear to me that Kotlin developers will still be reliant on tried and tested Java based technologies for quite some time to come.
Now I unfortunately have to jump to a second point before concluding. Who is using Kotlin in what capacity? This will give you better direction as to what language features are really important. I do understand it that you don’t want to bloat the language with API features - that is not what I am talking about - but there is effect if you consider the first point of which/where in most of these libraries, arrays still play a huge role.
In all honesty - I have buried the issue until it resurfaced - and many months later the lack of a short form array still is a pain to me. And like said before - this is mostly due to the fact that the rest of the syntax is super short, concise, even pretty; which makes arrayOf stand out like a sore thumb.