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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

Oracle has a long track record of Sales & Marketing tactics which we can use as a reliable benchmark to predict outcomes.

Oracle will likely pursue the most aggressive strategy they can get away with Java.

I don't believe Sun was suing Google, but Oracle did.

The fact that Google is switching to Kotlin is mostly a means to absolve themselves of the 'Oracle risk' - it's a big change surely, a decision not taken lightly.

The future of Java under Oracle is hard to predict but there's legit concerns Oracle will make things hard.

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Kotlin uses the same VM and API, so it makes no difference in this regard. It's not a big change – it's fully interoperable with Java. You can easily take a single class in a Java application and rewrite it in Kotlin, and everything continues working just as before.

Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.

but you splitting your developer base. * There will be people better at kotlin * There will be people better at java.

This is a problem when you are looking at hiring new people etc . This fragmentation is going cause issues just because people are hedging against Oracle future decisions.

In a perfect world Google should have bought Sun and the current version of Java would look at lot like Kotlin.

Kotlin is a light syntax for a coding style. It's as easy for a Java dev to learn Kotlin as it is to learn Spring or Hibernate or whatever library or framework the team at your new job uses

It's a whole other domain of things to learn, and now we're stuck with context switching all of the time.

Even if Kotline were 'better' (And I don't think it is), it'd have to be quite a jump better.

It's a little nicer for getting ideas down quickly, but beyond that to me it's just 'different' and now a whole other bag of things to support.

If I have to chose between Kotlin+Java or just Java I'll take just Java.

Going back to Java from Kotlin there's really nothing I miss.

I think Sun might have wanted to sue Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951407

Yes, thanks for that, it stirred my recollection as I actually bumped into Jon Swartz by accident just in that era.

I don't think it was money, so much as the established culture at Sun (i.e. James Gosling: "Sun is not so much a company but a debating society). A more aggressive CEO/leadership/culture would have maybe raised the money to take on Google, or to take another tact.

So while you are right - and thanks for the reference - the issue here is what Sun was about, vs. what Oracle is about.

I've been saying for years that Pivotal Labs is a debating club that produces code as a by-product. But now I'm wondering if I read the Gosling quip and then forgot I had.

Whatever Sun was "about", sadly, it didn't work, and damaged some excellent technologies, like Java and Solaris, that Sun couldn't invest a lot of resources into because it no longer had them. Oracle managed to save one of them and make it thrive. Sun, as a big, impactful company, was a product of the dot-com bubble. It certainly made more lasting contributions than other bubble-era companies, but its strategy couldn't survive the crash. Maybe great ideas can be born in companies like Sun but need companies like Oracle to sustain.

Google made $billions from Java while Sun went near bankrupt, and is now a top-10 wealthiest company in USA. Oracle trying to get $ from Google in partnership with the former Sun is a different issue from your company's risk.

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