Agreed. Especially since the actual biggest individual contributor (for people living in the developed world) is having children, and we really don't want this kind of individual focus to land there.
One thing I like about this and the OP-1 is they hit that retrofuturism, Tokyo-in-1985 kind of vibe so well with their marketing, its really well thought out.
I think its pretty damning for the guy who literally wrote the book on making tech products more addictive (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products) is telling us the technology isn't the problem, we just need to solve our inability to cope with our feelings. Sounds like an attempt to absolve guilt.
I've seen a lot of that kind of thing in non-Spring code (I can think of at least one codebase where they rejected using Spring as terrible, but their hand-rolled alternative eventually grew to something much worse), and honestly good Spring Boot code looks surprisingly nice and free of that kind of thing.
Maybe it was old school Spring that started it (it seems to have seen a big uptick in enterprise grossness in the 2000s so its an interesting hypothesis), but even Spring has moved on from it.
Old code and programmers with old ideas hold back "real life" Java projects quite a bit from what they technically could be in a more modern form.
Complexity and bloat definitely come with that, I think some folk get used to building EnterpriseTurboWidgetFactoryImpl type horrors and never consider the language doesn't need to do that kind of thing any more... Java being so backward compatible I think also means it doesn't do enough to discourage that either though, which is also a reason why Kotlin is so nice -- the lowest effort solution is miles more understandable.
Speaking as someone who technically would fall in b) in your community list: Java has all of those nice features and tooling now of other static languages, and when I tried out Go I found it tedious to work without them, especially generics.
I mean sure, I'd rather be working in Kotlin, but Java is at least acceptable now.
I think in summer you might find the mosquitoes too annoying to be outside with, and in winter -- you have to keep in mind its not just a shorter day, its also permanently sunrise/sunset on sunny days (depending on your latitude, it could also be just really dark) and mostly slate grey skies anyway so the concept of a "sun room" doesn't really make sense. I quite like Scandinavian winter (I'm in Sweden), but its not for everyone.
It is very beautiful up in Norway though, and the Norwegians
are nice people.