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Comment by crispytx | Hacker News Reader

Apple came out with Swift to make iOS development easier. I think Google is trying to do the same thing by adding official support for Kotlin in Android.

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I am sorry but you are missing the point of my question, it is not why Google did it but in comparison to Groovy.

And groovy stole x from ruby and y from JS which stole from C which stole from Smalltalk. Who cares? Use Kotlin or not. Don't worry about perceived idea theft.

The issue is not who "stole" from whom but that people now seem to claim and believe that Kotlin's features are unique to Kotlin and for the majority of its features that is not true, they were taken one-to-one from Groovy.

I don't know a single person that like a Kotlin because it us revolutionary or new.

People like it because it is a less bad Java. Most of the benefits with fewer drawbacks.

I personally prefer scala but the market doesn't seem to be going that way.

Well you probably already know this, but I think Google is promoting Kotlin over Groovy because of their association with JetBrains. I'm sure if Google developed Android Studio from scratch instead of using JetBrains IDE as the basis for Android Studio, maybe they would have chosen Groovy. So yeah, they just as easily could have chosen to add official support for the Groovy programming language and achieved the same goal of making Android development easier.

> I'm sure if Google developed Android Studio from scratch, [...] maybe they would have chosen Groovy

I'm sure they would have also developed the build language from scratch also, and I doubt it would have been as cluttered as Apache Groovy. Check out the Groovy developers mailing list [1] to see how inactive Groovy development is nowadays.

[1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/groovy-dev/201705.m...

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