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Comment by tapas73 | Hacker News Reader

My take on this:

1. Societal issues. Microsoft wanted Java they could control and change. C# it is then. Google is moving away from java to kotlin, because of disagreements with Oracle.

2. Wish of different trade offs. fast-to-learn vs feature-full vs ease-of-use vs configurability vs portability vs speed vs safety vs developer friendly vs user friendly vs admin friendly vs development-speed vs program corectness.

3. Low proof-of-concept cost. If some lib involves lot of boilerplate for my usecase, it is easy to create my own improved version and feel the sense of achievement (my version might be just a wrapper at first, but the gate have opened)

4. Reduction-of-programing-worlds-complexity is at the bottom of everybodies priority lists.

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Google moving away from Java has nothing to do with Oracle. That lawsuit was about an old Sun license of Java that was thought to be hurt by Google.

Since then, Java was completely open-sourced, having the same license as the Linux kernel, so there is nothing stopping android from using it. The preference for kotlin comes from the fact that Android’s Java is barely at OpenJDK’s Java 8 versions, making syntactic sugars all that much more important there.

> Google is moving away from java to kotlin, because of disagreements with Oracle.

Java and it's VM are OpenSource. So that argument doesn't make any sense.

Also I don't think Google would, or even could, move away form one of their primary languages.

Kotlin on the other hand is only a significant trend in Android development, and it will get dropped like a hot potato in favor of Dart as soon as Fuchsia arrives as Android successor, I guess.

Kotlin has a problem: It tries to be "the better Java", but Java is picking up (slowly) all the features. The space for a significantly more powerful JVM language is already taken by Scala. So in the long run there won't be much space for Kotlin left: As soon as Java will get "more modern Features" Kotlin will have a hard time to compete. As likely mostly only syntax differences will remain.

> Kotlin on the other hand is only a significant trend in Android development, and it will get dropped like a hot potato in favor of Dart as soon as Fuchsia arrives as Android successor, I guess.

Do you have any idea just how much there's Android/Java/Kotlin code now?

> Kotlin has a problem: It tries to be "the better Java", but Java is picking up (slowly) all the features.

2016 called. Wants your opinion back. Kotlin is sooo much more now than "better Java", it is a Multiplatform, efficient and pragmatic language that is just pleasant to work with, unlike even modern Java.

It has first party support for iOS, Android, desktop and JS. It has modern Multiplatform GUI framework that rivals React and Flutter.

It has countless syntactic features and built-in null safety.

Java will be forever stuck in server and niche products like Intellij.

> Do you have any idea just how much there's Android/Java/Kotlin code now?

Does Google care? Ever had a look at their graveyard?

The rest sounds just like the usual marketing yada-yada and doesn't stand reality…

> Does Google care? Ever had a look at their graveyard?

Please, Google graveyard meme here?

Name at least one DEVELOPMENT project that was killed by them. Even the infamous GWT is still alive on life support.

In case you're serious, it seems you don't understand or know the scale of Android project. Android is one of the most important projects of Google, it rivals Chrome and YouTube.

> The rest sound just like the usual marketing yada-yada and doesn't stand reality…

Please, launch your Java application on Node.js or in a browser, or on iOS, on Android for that matter. Or create modern client-side application that runs on all major platforms.

And no, Codename One/Gluon/JavaFX don't count. Even worst of the worst Ionic runs better than those.

That's why you're using a throwaway account?

Codename One works as well as Ionic when used by the right developer.

> Codename One works as well as Ionic when used by the right developer.

Oh I'm sure it is. Both of them are awfully terrible compared to even React Native/Flutter, let alone native.

It's also as good as Flutter. It's a matter of developer skill. Not the tool. Flutter has better default look and feel, that's about it. React native isn't a write once run anywhere tool. As a result it has a lot of different problems which imo make it way worse than all of the above.

> It's also as good as Flutter.

It's not. Last time I used it, everything was super janky, the look of app from 90s also didn't impress me.

The DX is awful, compared to neat single binary of Flutter.

> React native isn't a write once run anywhere tool. As a result it has a lot of different problems which imo make it way worse than all of the above.

I only care about result, not semantics.

It's a wast of time to engage with a troll. It won't result in any curious discussion.

> Name at least one DEVELOPMENT project that was killed by them.

Google code. Google code search.

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