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Comment by dliff | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see Kotlin in your list. Google has stated they are increasingly moving Android development to a Kotlin-first ideology. New official libraries produced by Google for Android are designed with Kotlin chiefly in mind, so it may provide significant benefits to support, community, and documentation.

Considering the popularity of the Android platform and Google's control over it, I don't think it is a bad idea to develop an Android app in Kotlin. According to Google, their Maps, Home, Play, Drive, and Messages apps are all built in Kotlin, and my personal experience is that Android developers like and prefer Kotlin.

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> Google has stated they are increasingly moving Android development to a Kotlin-first ideology

Wow if Google is behind it, where do I sign up? It’s definitely going to take off and not be abandoned.

I probably could even write some games I could release on Stadia.

I thought they were fully committed to Dart or was that last week?

Kotlin is JetBrains, not Google. Even if Google declared bankruptcy tomorrow, it would still be under active development.

And how well was Kotlin doing before it was backed by Google?

Very well. Google deciding to back it for Android wasn't some bold, out there decision. Android developers could already use kotlin, because of its Java interop. Google was just responding to pre-existing demand that the community was already generating.

That's why I don't think it makes much sense to treat kotlin in the same category as the other languages. Sure, it's a programming language, but the way JetBrains executed on it with its easy upgrade path from java and really excellent design, not to mention the toolchain, mean that it's success and trajectory cannot easily be generalized to other "weird languages".

Kotlin is JetBrains only Google has blessed it...

Also compiled languages have longer staying power because if you move on from the language, you can still make use of the binaries but simply never write it again. Look at all the Fortran libs that are still in use by other languages...

Yes and how popular do you think Kotlin would be without Google’s “blessing”?

Kotlin was recognized by Google because it was getting traction, not the other way around. Get your facts straight.

> Wow if Google is behind it, where do I sign up?

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

> and my personal experience is that Android developers like and prefer Kotlin

That is because the other option is a deliberately crippled Java from a decade ago. Also, while apps are indeed mostly written in Kotlin for android, I am fairly sure most of Google’s listed apps have a Java shared library that does the core of the functionality that is shared between backend, android, web frontend (j2cl) and ios (j2objc).

Also, don’t forget that android development is a niche, on the web backend side Java is just an incomparable bigger player.

They don't distinguish between managed environments/multilingual platforms (JVM, .NET, wasm) and single pony shows. Which makes it harder to see how related Scala/Kotlin/Java are and how much they overlap ecosystem-wise.

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