I see the biggest market for Kotlin being Android. It manages to provide features that Java will likely never have while still having a fairly small impact on run time, deploy, and APK size. The conversion tool is really great too. It makes it much easier to migrate a project to kotlin, especially when trying to figure out more complex stuff like annotations. I see Kotlin being Android's Swift in the future.
on_and_off|9 years ago
I fear that it will be hard to move in that direction as long as Google does not push in that direction though.
The official word is that we don't need their support in order to write Android apps in Kotlin, which is true and that the gap between objC and Swift was large enough to justify the change but that Java is not that old, which is debatable.
In all cases, it is hard to argument the move to a new language in an existing codebase when there is no official push in that direction.
If I have to create a new app in the near future, I will strongly consider Kotlin, but for the 8 eight old codebase I have to deal with + the 15 engineers working on it, my hands are tied.
izacus|9 years ago
I don't understand the logic behind this sentence? Why do you need Google to push you somewhere instead of you youself choosing a more productive option?
Kotlin is designed to be easy to integrate into existing Java codebase and our introduction to a largeish Android codebase has been a great success.