After a year of writing Kotlin code, I still start writing ? and catch myself when completions don’t work because the code makes no sense in Kotlin.
I have plenty of Kotlin if else expressions used but still prefer the elegance and aesthetics of the ternary operator, for short and shallow conditional expressions. I know and understand that the if in Kotlin and ? : are equivalent but that is not the point.
If else may be equivalent and only 4 characters longer but not as elegant for simple conditions and expressions.
It is definitely not an argument against Kotlin, which I find in general very elegant and highly productive, especially when compared to Java, but it is a minor nuisance.
For anything but short conditions and maybe one nesting level, I prefer the full if/else syntax which lends itself to better formatting to convey the logical structure.
It is not lack of Kotlin coding either, in my Markdown Navigator plugin Java and Kotlin code is about 50/50 with 60k lines of each. Kotlin being more terse, I would argue that I have more functionality implemented in Kotlin than Java.
I was hoping with time to get over ternary operator use but so far have not managed to kick the habit.