What do you think about Kotlin as a first-class language for Android?

This is what I think
https://medium.com/p/should-i-learn-kotlin-or-stick-to-java-3a73c3580ac3

I have taken a look on Kotlin and it seems like Java on some high-performance drugs. It gives you the functionality you need sometimes – but you have to take care.

The idea I like about the language is that they target native and JavaScript compiling results. This will help Java / Kotlin developers to extend their reach without touching programming languages they do not want to.

For Android it will make development easier and I think it will be like Swift is for iOS: more developers will join the train.

I have used Kotlin quite a bit on the server side as well as on small Android projects. I absolutely love the language. It brings out the needed enhancements to Java but doesn’t luckily take it as far as Scala has gone. This keeps the surface area small enough and easy to jump into for Java devs.

Jetbrains has done an amazing job with Java interoperability and naturally tooling around the language is fantastic. For me language has slotted itself in very easily with both Ratpack and Spring Boot and transition to Kotlin from Java based codebases has been very easy. I especially love the better type inference compared to Java and terseness that comes with it. Functional constructs also work better with that, even though higher kinded types or monadic do notation are not part of the language, nor probably won’t ever be.

For Android programming especially Kotlin is a godsend considering the lock in to an ancient Java version on that platform. On Android world everything works out of the box and finally makes that ecosystem pleasant to work with.

I think the team behind the lang has made good decisions on what to include and what to leave out. Introducing Kotlin on the JVM has been a smart move and making it work out of the box so easily with existing Java codebases is a brilliant move from them. I think this lang has a bright future ahead of it.

I follow the JetBrains team closely and they have a track record of creating softwares (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, PHPStorm etc) and language helpers (ReSharper!!) which are intuitive and help the developer up their game.

Haven’t played around with Kotlin yet. But I am super excited to see what the community does with it now that it is officially supported by Google.

As I work with swift for iOS and Java for android, and swift and kotlin is very similar modern language and now kotlin is official it’s great relive for me.

I personally haven’t tried Kotlin to build apps yet, but this language looks even more promising now that Google is behind it. Looking forward to simplifying and speeding up my development process with it!