Google Pushes Kotlin Over Java for Android Development

'Google "officially declared Kotlin the go-to language for Android
development last week at its Google I/O developer conference," reports
Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column, "and the company is
backing that up with a couple of initiatives around making it easier
(and free) to learn the language now used by a majority of Android
developers."

Google teamed up with Udacity to offer Developing Android Apps with
Kotlin , a free, self-paced online course on how to build Android apps
with Jetpack and Kotlin, meant for people who have programming
experience and are comfortable with Kotlin basics. Google also
announced "Kotlin/Everywhere, a series of community-driven events
focussing on the potential of Kotlin on all platforms," which it is
putting on in conjunction with JetBrains.

Of course, this leaves the question that has been asked many times
before -- why Kotlin? -- and IT consultant Kristen Carter offers a
take on how Android app development became Kotlin-first. Carter offers
some business angles, such as the 2010 lawsuit against Google by
Oracle, which predates Kotlin by just a year, and she speculates may
have been the impetus behind the language's development as "Google has
always wanted to get away from the [Java] ecosystem." At the same
time, Carter offers some language-specific reasoning too, such as the
comparably succinct nature of Kotlin, the absence of Java's
NullPointerExceptions, and the ease with which Java developers could
transition to Kotlin. Carter ends her piece by posing the possibility
that Oracle "knows the significance of Java in android app
development" and could "ship Java with a few upgrades in its next
version to take on Kotlin."'

-- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/05/17/2355248

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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