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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Has the Android world moved to Kotlin then?

Anecdotal, but it seems to be on par with iOS Objc->Swift. New stuff is Kotlin, but unless you have a strong reason to rewrite, it stays ObjC.

A major difference is that there is a tool for automatically converting from Java to Kotlin. I don't think that exists for Objc to Swift.

There is this, which can help get started.

http://swiftify.com/

The code it generates leaves a lot to be desired. It's highly non-idiomatic, and has the marks of a computer-generated structure all over it. This being said, it certainly facilitates the transition from Java to Kotlin as it makes for a convenient learning tool (used on small portions of code).

The transition to Swift has accelerated in the past year. Might be because of SwiftUI or because it’s now mature.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

ABI stability. You don't need to ship the whole runtime with it anymore. Though if you want a framework that works nice with both languages and older versions Objective-C is still better.

Yes, Kotlin is preferred language now. Some new Google libraries are targeting Kotlin first. You should not use Java for new projects.

Kotlin is great, but if you're looking for max maintainability in the next ~10 years Java is better. It's just so much easier to hire for Java!

Kotlin is Java++, you can easily hire Java developers and have them working on the code base within days.

I would say Kotlin is Java+ and Scala is Java++

I'm not a 100% sure since I only did basic Scala intro, but it seems like it has a non-trivial learning curve coming from Java - for ex. I was a C# dev with FP experience and it stil took me a while to figure out the basics in Scala. With Kotlin, I barely knew Java and I just used autoconvert and google to simplify my Java code when I was writing some android native stuff.

As an Android dev, I disregarded any company hiring that was not transitioning to Kotlin. It was a major red flag if the project was relatively new. My personal project on spring boot is completely powered by Kotlin and I fully expect KotlinJS to be ready for production in a year or so for full stack development.

Writing in Kotlin really is a nicer experience and with near full access to all the legacy java libraries I would never want to switch back even with the small improvements java has made to be more like Kotlin. I highly suspect as the number of java devs that are exposed to Kotlin increases the number of devs happy to write in Java over Kotlin (or Scala) will decrease. Android going Kotlin first was in part justified by giving the decision makers a short period of a week or two to get adjusted away from java and see how they felt about the language in comparison

I agree with everything you say, but that transition will take time. I think Kotlin is a great language, and combines a lot of the best strengths of others while not giving up that JVM tooling goodness. However, I think you still need to have good Java chops to work with Kotlin, at least to deal with those dependencies. In fact, its almost exactly the situation that TypeScript has: yes, its a good language, but you can't really use it well unless you know JavaScript (and in particular, ES6) really well. Edit: sorry, I'm really talking more generally than Android. You're probably right about hiring for Kotlin for Android instead of Java. But Kotlin is targeted at everything, and for that I think it's probably good to wait a bit.

So you're forced to learn a new language? I was obliged to write code for a university project in Kotlin instead of Java.

Most of the code was already written in Java. So I just used the tool to convert to Kotlin. Then I tried to infer how Kotlin works based on the generated code to write the rest. I don't feel proud about that project.

> You should not use Java for new projects.

Good to know for my next Udemy course.

This sucks so hard. Most Java libraries are planning to drop support for Java 8 when Java 17 hits LTS. This will completely divide the language into two, one for Android and the other for everything else.

Google could just run OpenJDK on phones and toss all the garbage they built, but they're too proud. The GC and performance of ART isn't anywhere near OpenJDK

Probably only about 20-25%, I still use and Prefer Java

I wish Google would stop farting out new languages every few months and focus on Kotlin. If they don't want to commit to any of them, they should throw in the towel, adopt Swift, and be done with it. The continual flailing is goddamned annoying.

On android there is absolutely no sign that there is anything besides a full commitment to Kotlin. There are no new docs put out without Kotlin code and all the major libraries have ktx variants that allow for better idiomatic Kotlin code.

In the community one of the easiest ways to spot if an example is old and probably out dated is if the author wrote it in Java. New things people aren't even bother keeping up the guise that Java is relevant to new things.

Also Kotlin isn't created by Google and I personally would rather see Kotlin come out on top if we are directly comparing it to Swift.

They seem similar from the very, very small amount of Kotlin I’ve seen. Why do you prefer it over Swift?

Also I wasn’t referring specifically to Android, where I realize Kotlin is now dominant.

> Also I wasn’t referring specifically to Android

Then what are you referring to? The only languages Google has released are Dart & Go, which are 8 & 10 years old respectively. That doesn't remotely qualify as "farting out new languages every few months"

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