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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"Android development at Meta has been Kotlin-first since 2020, and developers have been saying they prefer Kotlin as a language for even longer."

Not one link to an opinion piece or two regarding: "kotlin vs java". The nearest thing I found was "What makes Kotlin different".

This sounds somewhat like a debate about which Germanic language is best. German, Dutch and English are all "Germanic" but which is "best"?

Obviously: That's the wrong question to ask and so an answer is doomed to failure.

In the end, does your generated machine code implore the CPU and associated hardware to do what you want it to more efficiently in some way that is not an abstraction?

Pissing contests rarely excite me. Why did you do this?

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> Why did you do this?

You literally quoted the "why": their developers prefer writing Kotlin over Java for Android development. That's it. They don't need further justification. They didn't need a "Kotlin vs. Java" comparison, and they're not really evangelizing Kotlin all that much. They're simply stating a fact for their organization: Kotlin is a better fit for their developers than Java is.

> In the end, does your generated machine code implore the CPU and associated hardware to do what you want it to more efficiently in some way that is not an abstraction?

Most shops don't care about this too much. The most important thing is developer productivity.

(And yes, this is why we have bloated garbage like Electron these days; sometimes some people value developer productivity to unhealthy extremes.)

So why bother posting on HN if it was inevitable?

Seems to me the article focused on how they did this big job, rather than why.

I think a pissing contest is precisely what they were hoping to avoid by not linking to some "Kotlin v Java" blog post. That their developers prefer writing in Kotlin is a basic premise for the rest of the article, not its thesis.

The target audience for this kind of article - Android engineers - do not need any more convincing on why Kotlin is superior to Java. This is a debate that has been settled in the Android community since a long time ago. I'd be willing to bet money on there only being a rounding error of Android engineers advocating the use of Java over Kotlin these days.

Your analogy doesn't make much sense. Natural languages aren't really designed for any particular purpose, so there's no clear basis for comparison. Programming languages are designed to write software, so you can directly compare them on metrics such as, how much time it takes to solve a given task, average percentage of bugs in the resulting code etc.

And abstractions are useful. If they weren't, we'd still be writing in assembly.

Blimey, DV'd within seconds!

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