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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin's main improvement on Java is its seamless integration with the most popular IDE on the JVM. Of course, it helps that IntelliJ and Kotlin are put out by the same company, but Jetbrains did emphasize when they first announced Kotlin that its integration with IntelliJ would be top priority. Groovy and Scala never had this improvement.

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Yet, Scala has much better and broader IDE support than Kotlin these days. There is first-class support in IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse and VS-Code, and with advent of Scala 3 the IDE story is going to be even better with full LSP support, so any IDE or editor could get accurate type-aware highlighting and autocomplete for virtually free.

Kotlin has good support only in IDEA and JetBrains said they wouldn't support other IDEs. They seem to make exactly the same mistake as Scala 2 did with supporting only one IDE initially (Eclipse).

If that's true, then Kotlin is successful despite its lesser IDE support.

Main reason for Kotlin uptake is Android. Kotlin is successful due to smaller footprint of its runtime lib and just-slightly-better Java philosophy, because it uses Java collections instead of bringing its own like Scala did. A big runtime library and problems caused by high method count hitting limits of Android runtime slowed down adoption of Scala on Android and allowed Kotlin to take that niche. Later the official support from Google reinforced its position.

> Kotlin's main improvement on Java is its seamless integration with the most popular IDE on the JVM.

Did Java not have seamless integration? I thought several IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ) were designed specifically around Java.

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