[hhandoko]

> Nothing really changed, you could write Android apps on Kotlin before, as well as on any other JVM language. But now "Kotlin is the hero".

The announcement shows Google making a commitment to make Kotlin successful in Android, rather than leaving the effort all to the community and JetBrains.

> I suspect that Google's adoption of Kotlin is just politics: [...] Google could acknowledge Scala years ago, but didn't [...]

I think this post explains it best: https://medium.com/@ScalaWilliam/why-scala-didnt-miss-the-an... .

In regards with the Scala evolution, there's a lot of things to be excited about. In the near term, 2.13 should see various optimisation to core libraries and faster compilation.

> Also, I don't understand the point of Kotlin. [...] Kotlin is just a subset of Scala. [...]

Kotlin is a better Java, whereas Scala is much, much more.

Scala is still my go-to JVM languages, but one Kotlin use case for me is to write libraries that will be called from Java [1]. Its biggest advantage is that it's succinct, has useful functional features (e.g. Scala-like collections), while producing code signatures that's very close to Java.

Notes:

[1] - https://github.com/builtamont-oss/cassandra-migration