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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're being unreasonable. In my experimentation I concluded that Kotlin was largely chasing a subset mindshare of Scala, so I see it being at a long term disadvantage.

That said, one killer app can make a language, so who knows. But if you want a typed expressive hybrid-paradigm JVM language, it seems Scala is the obvious choice.

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I agree with you, however currently JetBrains is making sure Kotlin works reasonable well on Android, while no one really cares about Scala on Android.

Yes many in the Scala community do care, but there isn't an ongoing effort with Android Studio tooling integration as in Kotlin.

So this could be a way for it to pick up steam, but it remains to be seen if the Android team still keeps the "We care only about Java" attitude at the upcoming Google IO.

Good point, and one I've got a blindspot for because we're not coding for Android (other than via Unity).

So yes, that could be enough of the 'killer app', if Android stays with Java. Do you have any intuition for why 'nobody cares about Scala on Android'? Not doubting you, just curious.

I doubt they would move away from Java, in spite of the ongoing trial. The question is officially supporting other JVM languages.

There are some people writing sbt plugins for Android development, but that is not the same as the full Android Studio development experience.

Android integration works fine, and the SBT builder is so much better and faster than Google's Gradle one.

In fact SBT + ProGuard is faster than Gradle + no ProGuard.

Last time I looked into it, it didn't seem to integrate that well with Android Studio and all the GUI tools.

Has this somehow improved?

Which GUI tools do you have in mind?

Android studio and everything that depends on the Gradle integration deep within it.

For example, I do actually like XML, but when I looked at it I came out with the idea that I could not use the visual tooling any longer, rather some Scala DSL.

Ah alright. yes, I think it makes more sense to define the GUI with code. Typed resources help with it.

sbt-android-gradle has full support for Gradle projects, but to be honest: Gradle is utter shit. Just use the SBT plugin. it works so much better. The latest version even manages SDK and NDK for you.

I don't like having to use a different language (i.e. Apache Groovy) to write build scripts when using Gradle with Scala. With SBT, I write Scala to build Scala, see [1]. I can see why someone would use Groovy to build a Groovy project, but why should I use 20 lines of Groovy to build Scala?

I notice Kobalt [2] for Kotlin is still being actively developed, and Leiningen for Clojure, both using the syntax of the language they're compiling for their build DSL. If Gradle won't become language agnostic for specifying its build scripts instead of shoving something else down people's throats, people will elsewhere, or stick with Maven.

[1] http://alvinalexander.com/scala/sbt-syntax-examples

[2] https://github.com/cbeust/kobalt

I agree with your opinion, if it wasn't for Android I very much doubt anyone would care about Gradle.

Have to try it out again.

I don't believe our goal was to capture a subset of Scala developers.

Not quite what I meant. I meant the set of people for whom Kotlin would be a good fit is largely (but not totally, I'd guess) a subset of those who would gain from using Scala. Therefore for any developer auditing languages, Kotlin and Scala are likely to be peers (as they were for me) and in that case, Scala being more established (i.e. more resources, more employees, more stack overflow questions) means Kotlin would struggle.

I just re-read the 'comparison to Scala' page, and that seems to reinforce that, e.g.: "if you're happy with Scala, you don't need Kotlin".

Which is not to argue my point: you know your goals far better than I. But if anything, take it as a gentle criticism of your messaging.

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