Google scored points with its community by supporting Kotlin

Kotlin is exactly what Google needed to light a fire under Oracle&#x27;s ass. They&#x27;ve been dragging their feet on new Java features for years. That, and the constant threat of Oracle closing Java back up as they&#x27;re doing to MySQL.<p>The backlash against jigsaw may turn out to be justified. &quot;Modularizing&quot; the JVM would be exactly what you would expect as a first step to making some parts proprietary. If Oracle can wall off parts of the JVM completely they can claim GPL exemption for these parts and start closed source development of &quot;enterprise&quot; level features.<p>Kotlin will do a lot to derail attempts to make Java proprietary. Since it works fine on Java6 JVM&#x27;s it sends a strong signal to Oracle that &quot;we don&#x27;t need you, if you piss us off we&#x27;ll just fork the language&quot;.

TL;DR -- because developers love it. I clicked the article hoping there was some strategic background, some connection to the Oracle lawsuit, etc. Nop, the answer to &quot;why&quot; is &quot;because of its merits&quot;. Also in this article, some backstory about the name &quot;Kotlin&quot;.

The language is indeed very nice but really key things that make it so nice are also:<p>1. The IDE support (without it, it would be somewhat more painful)<p>2. The fact JetBrains have built a really great new syntax and still have it compile down to regular java bytecode - and bytecode that isn&#x27;t a total nightmare (I&#x27;m looking at you Scala!)<p>3. JetBrains use it themselves for their own suite of commercial products (mostly code editors) - this made me feel like it was less likely to become a toy language.<p>4. The fact that coming from Java it is absolutely painless - familiar syntax, automatic code conversion that works well for the most part, and full interop with Java.

&gt; In the early 1700s, Peter the Great, the czar of Russia, was busy nabbing land from his western neighbor, the Swedish Empire. He seized the tip of the Gulf of Finland, and began building his beloved city of Saint Petersburg there. He also secured a small island just off its coast as a naval defense: Kotlin.<p>&gt; Peter couldn’t have known that more than three centuries and 5,500 miles removed...<p>However, if you are from eastern Europe, chances are you&#x27;ve ran into large brand of tomato products known by same name:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maspex.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;pl&#x2F;news_spotlight&#x2F;file_57502ce3e53816450428143.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maspex.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;pl&#x2F;news_spotlight&#x2F;file_57502ce3e538...</a><p>;)

Exactly this. So tired of these self-entitled feeling-smart conspiracist unnecessary interpolation of unrelated events, e.g. Oracle lawsuit, Google&#x27;s agenda blahblah.<p>Kotlin is already popular in Android dev crowd. That is the one and foremost factor that why Google <i>would</i> support it. Because there is already a community and a robust toolchain(Thanks to Jetbrain) over there. It is a low-hanging effort for Google to claim by simply signaling a gesture with very little to commit really.

Kotlin is already quite popular in the Android community. I would actually point out that it is the engineers at Square (like Jake Wharton) that gave Kotlin it&#x27;s early legitimacy.<p>The Google announcement excites me for reasons beyond Android - I&#x27;m hoping that Google&#x27;s huge investments in machine learning, play off along with the amount of investment it is going to do in Kotlin.<p>I would love to see a whole bunch of server side infrastructural components built out in Kotlin ... including things like Tensorflow, Spark, etc<p>More than Oracle, I think this is pretty much the death knell for Scala. When you have a far more pleasant language, with IDE integration that is mind blowing, and is supported by one of the largest companies in the world ... And probably is ALREADY MUCH MUCH more popular than Scala at this point

You know, I gotta admit, as someone who rather likes Kotlin, even I&#x27;m getting a little exhausted with all the breathless Kotlin articles...

I&#x27;m glad to see Kotlin support (would love Python support but you can&#x27;t win them all)<p>The Android APIs are still a major problem for me. In web front-ends we&#x27;ve basically gone full FRP and I&#x27;m sitting here with my resource files and 10 line invocations to make a notification.<p>This is partly because it&#x27;s necessary for Java, but I&#x27;d love to see a first party API that tries out something a bit more fluent

Actual title &quot;The Language that Stole Android Developers’ Hearts&quot;

The way I see it - the fact that alternative JVM languages are so underused is a damn shame. And if it becomes more acceptable to not use Java, then all such languages will benefit. For many reasons Kotlin is better as a champion of such a change.

Probably a silly question, but since Android is OSS, what specifically prevents parties other than Google from adding &quot;first class&quot; language support?<p>Does Google not accept (major) external contributions to the build toolchains? Is it the official documentation that&#x27;s getting rewritten for Kotlin? Or is Google releasing Kotlin-ified wrappers for the Android APIs? Maybe I don&#x27;t fully understand what new privileges Kotlin is getting.

Why is Kotlin a better language for Android dev?<p>Won&#x27;t the platform APIs designed for Java look and feel very non-idiomatic in Kotlin?

I&#x27;m sure Kotlin is a good language but as a developer with a big codebase I find it difficult to migrate my Java code to Kotlin or mix both languages in the same project. I think I will be confused all the time!<p>If I would be starting with the platform now I&#x27;d start with it but now I dont see any reason!

Now more I think about It is genius move by Google. With this low effort work Google generated lot of buzz. Android remain same. Tooling and language is developed by Jetbrains for Kotlin. If Kotlin brings in new developer to Android, great for Google, if not, dependable Java is always there.

dude, wheres my dart&#x2F;go android support?

So how is Kotlin&#x27;s interop with native code? I heard it was still pretty bad with Java despite some updates in that department. Swift can handle some API&#x27;s but for real interop you can go back to Objective-C(++) wrappers with zero penalty.

I wonder if Kotlin could compile to Dalvik bytecode in the future? It might be pointless with Java, because Oracle owns Java compiler and maintaining separate fork might prove hard to do. But with Kotlin it should be somewhat easier. I&#x27;ve heard that the whole Android development is very slow because of those intermediate steps.<p>Also it might help to develop or improve live update features. If I&#x27;m developing server applications, I&#x27;m usually using JRebel which allows live reloads of bytecode and that&#x27;s tremendous productivity gain. Same with React Native. I&#x27;m not sure about pure Android development.

How is Kotlin compile speed relative to Scala? I imagine a little faster, anyone have experience on mid-size projects?

BTW for those who say that Scala interop with Java is as easy, can you demonstrate how to use this from Java?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tumblr&#x2F;colossus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tumblr&#x2F;colossus</a>

alright, wtf is kotlin, why is it suddenly such a big deal, and how big of a deal is it?<p>edit: so i checked this out myself. i have no idea why this is a big deal. another app language? i thought reactnative was all the jazz?

To summarize, is genius because it keeps devs happy. It&#x27;s an apple move

When I see quotes like &quot;Oh my God this is awesome&quot; my sensors go to red flag mode full-time.<p>Devs are people like everybody else and can be hyped.<p>Let&#x27;s give it time. Not sure what&#x27;s the big fuss about. Yes I&#x27;ve read about GUI toolkits that reduce the development time. This still doesn&#x27;t mean much IMO. The business owners will simply become more greedy and will demand more work for less money.<p>I really don&#x27;t see how the devs will win.

My question, which I also posted as Ask HN, was that why not Scala?

Not sure if swooned is the right word.

Such a misleading title!

Genius is a strong word here

Android will eventually adopt Swift. It is not a matter of &quot;if&quot; but &quot;when&quot;. Who knows 5 year from now, you all will be coding in Swift (for servers, iOS and Android).

&gt; Standing on stage on Wednesday morning at Google I&#x2F;O, &gt; Android PM Director Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson broke the &gt; news that Kotlin, which was first released in 2012, is now &gt; officially supported as a “first class” language for &gt; Android... &gt; developers whooped freely when told that they no longer had &gt; to worry that Kotlin fever was just a phase, to be &gt; abandoned like dozens of other cult favorites before it.<p>Nothing that google says about Kotlin could <i>possibly</i> mean that it&#x27;s not a phase, to be abandoned like other cult favorites before it. Is Kotlin more official than Wave? Reader? Fiber? Loon? Boston Dynamics? Picasa? Titan? Glass? Google+? Labs? Gears? Code Search? Health? Knol? Orkut? Answers? Deskbar? Page Creator? Sites?<p>Google has the right to stop supporting whatever they want, but there is a hard-to-measure cost in developer trust (and goodwill).<p>edit: formatting