Maybe, but it seems this post is to spread awarness to try and get other people involved in the project, not to actually play it. In that case, the language choice would be a big selling point
Since Maxis has more or less been gobbled up by EA I don't think we will ever see SimCity4++, so I think we DO need another city sim.
There are a few in the works but I don't think any "carry the torch" of the SC4-style game.
SimCity 4 has such staying power, new mods and lots are still being created to this day! It outlived SimCity 2013 by far.
Cities: Skylines, Banished, Citybound are all fun in their own right but I don't see any as a proper continuation of the SimCity series. (ignoring SC2013)
Interesting you say that, meanwhile Cities Skylines is the only city sim game I know of that's come out in the last 10 years that isn't ruined by EA or a shitware Farmville clone.
RPGs, FPSes have different themes and story, so there are a lot more variations. Plus many city sims can be modded.
You're probably right though. At the very least we could use more that aren't so traffic oriented. Maybe something with emphasis on pollution, agriculture, culture, utilities.
With the Java interop such a high priority for the Kotlin team over at JetBrains, Kotlin is sneaking its way into all kinds of Java environments -- from LOB apps to APIs, Java Web Services, etc.
Java might be a little annoying to wield, but the JVM is actually quite nice.
Whomever at JetBrains put a premium on Java interop should get a medal, because it's a VERY low friction move to go from Java development to Kotlin. You can port your project one file at a time and the tooling is excellent.
I have dabbled with all major JVM languages, yet if it wasn't for Spark and now Android, no customer would allow us to use anything besides Java itself.
