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Comment by alcidesfonseca | Hacker News Reader

Oracle suited Google for copying the APIs (not the implementation) of the Java standard APIs. It all started in 2010 [0]

Kotlin was Google's backup if the suit went Oracle's way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

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I'm no expert in the Android ecosystem, but I think it was primarily a good choice for giving devs features they wanted to have while the underlying runtime and standard library got stuck at Java 6. The reason why they are still on Java 6 might have to do with the law suit, though.

I guess given the recent court ruling we should see if Google sticks with Kotlin as a hedge, sticks with Kotlin because the community has embraced it, or pulls away from Kotlin as a no longer needed source of extra work.

It's Google. They'll probably come up with a completely new programming language which they'll force on the community in some ham fisted way, then suddenly drop it in a few years when they can't figure out a way to massively monetize it.

I thought that was Dart. Which is honestly a shame because it’s a genuinely great language. But it does very much fit the bill otherwise

Not really. Dart is single-threaded which was a mistake Google made in trying to keep it JS-compatible. If Dart had been multi-threaded from the start it might have stood a chance.

Dart always stuck me as a solution looking for a problem, particularly in lite of more recent progress in JS itself. Can I ask why you think its a genuinely great language worth looking at?

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