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Comment by dangets | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no, Jetbrains did an incredible job on Kotlin with seamless interop with Java, trouble-free mixed Java/Kotlin codebases, as well as reducing the learning curve and mental context switching as compared to something like Scala.

At my company there have been several devs trying to introduce Clojure as well as parallel forays to introduce Kotlin. Overall, Kotlin has caught on and spread much more rapidly and with less effort.

This is not a statement of which languages are "better" given all things equal or what problems each are suitable for, but in my first hand experience it is easier for the average Java developer to pick up Kotlin. Of course we as a company are also cognizant of the IntelliJ lock-in as I suspect using any other editor would run into the same random bugs / autocomplete annoyances that the GP experienced.

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> Of course we as a company are also cognizant of the IntelliJ lock-in

There's your politics. Kotlin is succeeding because of it's ties to a very popular Java IDE, so developers already using IntelliJ tend to trust it.

It wouldn't do nearly as well without that built in base of support.

It's primarily utility, not politics. Yes, sure, Kotlin gets free press because Jetbrains and Google support it... but it's also because Kotlin is a brilliant language, it had an initial use case that was in extremely high demand (building Android apps) and JVM compatibility meant it had an enormous ecosystem of compatible packages from the start. But instead of just sitting back and riding on its initial popularity (that would be "politics"), the language has added more and more use cases (backend, multiplatform, JS), expanded its scope (kotlinx extensions), and built a following and a Kotlin-specific ecosystem of packages and tools that often surpasses the JVM equivalents in utility and quality.

I think the fact that Google was not updating the java usable on Android might have also played a big role in kotlin adoption, don't you think?

Honestly I feel kotlin doesn't add much to modern java, and if possible I think it's generally better to use the native language to the platform. Probably a reason why kotlin is not that popular on the backend where people can use modern java :)

I think jimbokun statement is 100 percent correct which doesn't mean kotlin is a bad language.

> Honestly I feel kotlin doesn't add much to modern java

In that case, I hope you won't mind that I'll be ignoring the rest of your opinions on this particular topic.

Java is verbose by design while Kotlin is pragmatic. That's why I prefer Kotlin, even though on the backend I could have just as well taken the latest Java. That, and strict null checking.

I do not mind at all :)

The "brilliance" of any technology is not intrinsic to the technology. It's determined by humans.

It's always politics.

I see, so when I need to travel from Los Angeles to New York, deciding whether to fly on a commercial airplane or ride a bicycle, is a political decision? Reducing travel time by 99.99% isn't an intrinsic feature of airplane travel?

It actually is.

A country which would have made different political decisions may have decided to not provide a direct airplane flight, or as good of an interstate road system that makes the drive possible. They may have provided high speed rail instead that could have potentially been better if that’s what the country had chosen.

Would you say the 99.99% reduction in travel time is “brilliant”?

Me, I like sight seeing. A bicycle ride sounds brilliant. Even though it is much slower.

Yes, I would absolutely state that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands, of brilliant innovations, technologies and engineering feats that make it possible for a 757 to exist, and fly so safely, routinely and inexpensively that the general public takes it entirely for granted.

I’ll try make the point one last time then let you be.

“Brilliance” is a human attitude towards technology. It is not an intrinsic property of technology.

I agree that the word brilliant is an adjective that humans can choose to use or not use to describe a particular technology. Your initial statement was that making that decision is always due to politics, as opposed to a person's genuine opinion... or perhaps implying that people simply don't have the ability to evaluate something independently.

Because brilliance is about the people not about the technology it is political by definition

Sure, I can see that. I was differentiating between internal company scale politics vs. larger-than-company politics. If Microsoft gave the same first-class promotion and support to F# that it did to C#, that would undoubtedly increase F# adoption.

My experience is a micro-scale observation that it did not take much campaigning to convince developers to try it (given the existing level of support backed by Jetbrains).

And if Visual Studio had level of ergonomics any closer to JetBrains IDEs....

Not just IDE. It's because Kotlin is a general purpose PL with wide utility and tooling which Clojure doesn't come close to. Clojure doesn't even work on mobile platforms.

I'm not a clojure dev but I don't think that's true, I think you can do react-native with clojurescript

Third party React Native bindings for clojurescript vs official Android framework apis in Kotlin are not really comparable when evaluating each language for an Android app I’d argue. But you’re right in that it is somehow possible through enough layers.

And basic similarity with Java- feels different and better, but not as different as F# from C#, or Clojure from Java.

Scala’s an interesting case, it rather did catch on.

> At my company there have been several devs trying to introduce Clojure as well as parallel forays to introduce Kotlin. Overall, Kotlin has caught on and spread much more rapidly and with less effort.

The reason might be, that Clojure is following a completely different paradigm and people are not willing enough to learn it.

> This is not a statement of which languages are "better" given all things equal or what problems each are suitable for, but in my first hand experience it is easier for the average Java developer to pick up Kotlin.

Yep, I would expect that to be the case.

There is a lot to learn for the average Java only (so far) programmer to really get Clojure.

Well, that’s because Kotlin is very trivially close to java, it’s almost just syntactic sugar over it. A language with very different semantics like clojure will of course not fit in as well.

Politics.

The similarity to Java, something many developers already know, is an appeal to current popular sentiment. You can advocate the superiority of Clojure's S-expression inspired syntax or immutably data structures or pure functions all you want, most people will just pick something close to what they already know.

Yeah, not arguing that, just wanted to point out that languages have different “activation energies” — one may be able to convince management to add some kotlin to the codebase, but it is much harder for a more exotic language.

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