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Comment by chinhodado | Hacker News Reader

> Along with swift, they should be the general purpose programming languages in the near future.

Unfortunately that is not going to happen for Kotlin, unless it gets adopted by major projects, and by major I mean on the scale of Android.

Java is not going anywhere soon. If anything, Kotlin will become a second Scala.

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Well, it is broadly used by Android developers. For me Kotlin is above scala just because the tooling support (JetBrains the main developers of kotlin), and I find a big difference when writting kotlin and scala. I feel scala more difficult to read, while kotlin is just a pleasure to read code. Moreover you can mix java and kotlin in the same project without issues.

Why do you think it will be behind scala?

I don't mean to say it will be behind Scala, I just mean to say that it will end up in the same situation as Scala, a language that was meant to be a "better Java" but could never gain enough traction to take off.

When I used Scala I never though it would be better than java, just another alternative. But I think kotlin is better than java. I hope it gains traction but not sure about it.

Kotlin has a much smaller learning curve than Scala. I find it to be much more useful than any other language I've tried out. It has shiny, useful features like some of the more dynamic languages do, but it's close enough to Java that I'm comfortable using it.

Without having tried Kotlin myself, is it in any way compable to Groovy?

Are there any benefits or tradeoffs, based on what you might know about Groovy?

Kotlin's design was heavily influenced by Groovy. You can see it in the builder DSLs, the syntax, the fact that Gradle is adding support for Kotlin alongside Gradle, and comments by the Kotlin designers. The big difference of course is that Gradle is dynamically typed by default.

> Gradle is adding support for Kotlin alongside Gradle, and comments by the Kotlin designers. The big difference of course is that Gradle is dynamically typed by default.

You've fallen for the trap of mistaking Gradle to be Apache Groovy, perhaps because those 10-line build scripts for Gradle are the only encounter most programmers have with Groovy. Your comment should read "Gradle is adding support for Kotlin alongside Groovy, and comments by the Kotlin designers. The big difference of course is that Groovy is dynamically typed by default."

You're right - I know the difference but apparently something got corrupted between brain and keyboard!

It's similar to Groovy, which I've worked with non extensively, but I think it adds a lot more. I've always found development in Groovy to be closer to Ruby or Python, while Kotlin feels more like Java (just better :-)

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