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Comment by xfer | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin doesn't sound like a good language to bet on since most suitable(for jvm) features it has will be integrated by Java now that it has picked up pace.

I guess it only has decent marketshare because of google's android support(they are throwing stuff on the wall to move away from Oracle IP i guess) and Jetbrains being very popular among java devs.

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Most F500's with large Java codebases including Google and Amazon are already betting big on Kotlin for server side development.

Source? Never seen or heard a major F500 pick up Kotlin as their primary backend lang over Java.

I'm an SDE at AWS. Many teams including mine are using Kotlin for backend dev.

That story regarding Kotlin and Oracle doesn't sell because unless Google rewrites Android toolchains in Kotlin/Native, there is plenty of JVM infrastructure to deal with, and so far there haven't been signs to fully replace Android Java.

The sour grapes of the Kotlin/Android marriage is that going forward one will need KMM for code between JVM and ART, or be happy to just use what ART undestands.

I don't know about betting on it, but the type before identifier syntax has always been a pet peeve of mine, and so I'd never willingly use java if I have a choice. And null handling. Fuck Java's ridiculously verbose and error prone null handling.

I'll be sticking with Kotlin at least until Java can do better at killing null pointers than @NotNull. Optional is good, but not widely used enough to handle most cases.

I was recently evaluating Kotlin vs Java for a new Android app. Two factors made me choose to bet on Kotlin.

1) Jetpack Compose is very loudly Kotlin-first

2) I did a survey of Android developer job postings. Literally ALL of them were for Kotlin, with Java mentioned as a nice-to-have roughly 50% of the time.

On a technical note, I don't see Java fixing NPEs, checked exceptions, or general verbosity any time soon. Java gets to live with its legacy of bad choices, Kotlin is able to stay clean while still providing backward support by integrating with old Java code .

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