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Comment by alexandros | Hacker News Reader

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 "why" is "because of its merits". Also in this article, some backstory about the name "Kotlin".

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I wonder if the hn gods will change the title from "Why supporting Kotlin is genius move for Android" to something less sensationalist. Maybe not, as it's being posted by Steven Levy himself.

They will likely change it to what the article's title is.

It's not genius?

I also came to the conclusion that it's because:

* Developers are adopting it to begin with, without the announcement, locally to Orlando it's a rising language for Android developers, nobody's forcing the language on them, they try it, like it and bam. * Oracle lawsuit makes it a no brainer to accept other languages into the Android stack that could get them off their back. * Kotlin native would allow Android to maybe someday ditch the Java based VM altogetherm potentially.

The tooling is also great and the language seems to be rather healthy.

Note that Android does not use the Java VM. It never has. Initially code was compiled for the Dalvik VM, but more recently code is compiled for Art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime

There is no single Java VM. There's a specification with a significant number of different implementations, and the OpenJDK-based one is far from the only one in use today.

Also code is still compiled to the same format that the Dalvik VM consumed. ART is just a different system for getting from Java bytecode to something executable.

They aren't even architecturally similar. The ART VM is register based while the JVM is stack based.

To be fair I did say Java based VM.

A slightly less sweaty variation on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

yes: this is a terrible title for this post. even the primary article doesn't use this wording.

mods: can we get this changed to the original title?

    "The Language that Stole Android Developers’ Hearts"

i don't know if it's fair or not, but it feels like there is somebody making a really concerted effort to astroturf kotlin.

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