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Comment by hamidpalo | Hacker News Reader

My biggest hope for Google IO '14 is the announcement of Kotlin as the Android language. Yes, you can already use Kotlin for Android actually but it's not well-supported and the community is small.

The benefit for Google and developers would be clear -- no more Java and Oracle shenanigans. Google already has a solid relationship with JetBrains due to the fact that Android Studio is just IntelliJ CE. They could hammer out details about who owns it, what the future looks like, etc. The transition would be easy since Kotlin already plays well with Java.

JetBrains would have a massive win as well since it would drive sales of IntelliJ like no other.

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Or Dart. That is the only way I see Dart getting any real traction on the IT world at large.

But I agree with you given the move to Android Studio, Kotlin would be a possible candidate as well.

Kotlin would preserve Google's investment in Java in a way Dart wouldn't.

Dart requires a major redo of everything. Kotlin is a nice evolution with an easy and soft transition.

I spent a few minutes searching GitHub for the number of repos in different languages. The query I came up with is:

    https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A0..10000&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=<lang>

Where <lang> is replaced with the language you're curious about. Here's a few:

    Kotlin    200
    Dart    2,836
    Erlang  9,087
    Groovy 11,515
    Go     24,603
    Scala  25,846

While we've still got lots of catching up to do, I think Dart is doing pretty well given its youth. (I would include TypeScript in the above but unfortunately the language detection for it is broken so it reports a bunch of Qt C++ projects as TypeScript).

What most companies around the world use has very little to do with Github top languages.

I never get this trend to use Github to measure anything.

For comparison...

Top 10 languages:

    JavaScript  648,839
    Ruby        512,620
    Java        464,330
    Python      323,857
    PHP         319,106
    C           169,390
    C++         165,497
    CSS         141,254 //not Turing complete, but oh well
    C#          111,748
    Objective-C 107,682

JVM languages:

    Scala       25,854
    Clojure     17,532
    Groovy      11,520 //seems to be mostly picking up lone Gradle build scripts
    Kotlin         200
    Ceylon          60

Also:

    Typescript   3,042 //search function only intermittently fails
    Dart         2,888

Big business language:

    Cobol           50

According to who?

See the parent comment I replied to for the link, a language comparison of Github projects.

> I would include TypeScript in the above but unfortunately the language detection for it is broken

The broke seems to be intermittent only. The Groovy results seem to be permanently broken though - most of its results are multi-language projects where Groovy is used by a single Gradle build script.

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