Any theories on the deceased numbers for Kotlin? ...

# random

[eygraber]

Any theories on the deceased numbers for Kotlin?

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024/

[Stefan Oltmann]

Maybe because AI is so trending some people are forced to do something with Python and that’s where the increase comes from. The work on kotlindl was paused and it’s not usable for production right now. So I guess Kotlin is not really an option here.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Seems too little of a change to have any meaning. Likely the people sampled are just different this time around

[Stefan Oltmann]

Indeed, the sample size of 23k is not huge.

[Stefan Oltmann]

In Germany, one contributing factor could be the shift in IT education. Two years ago, schools transitioned from teaching Java or C# to focusing on Python. This change coincided with an expansion in IT specializations: previously limited to software development and hardware integration, two new tracks - data analysis and cloud administration—were introduced. It's likely this reflects the growing importance of AI, machine learning, and related technologies.

[Stefan Oltmann]

I got away with just Java back then, but my trainee has to learn Kotlin (because of the daily work with it), Java (because the books Clean Code, Design Patterns and Refactoring use it) and Python for school. 😅

[hho]

@eygraber I sincerely hope you've missed an "r" in that question
… or that study is way more grim than I thought 😅

[Stefan Oltmann]

Nice find 😄

[Frank Bouwens]

Java seems to be a lot more populair that Kotlin 🤔
I wonder why; Kotlin is compatible with Java,
so why not use Kotlin?
I would switch to Kotlin for the named-parameters and null-safety alone.

Seems most Android apps gradually replaced all Java with Kotlin in their apps. Maybe not so much for the big backend projects?

[Stefan Oltmann]

I quit my old job, because my previous employer did not want to migrate to Kotlin - and I wanted to use that outside of my side projects.

That's what my old supervisor responded to my repeated suggestion to migrate to Kotlin:
"Stefan, why the heck should I turn 15 Java experts into 15 Kotlin newbies?"

[Stefan Oltmann]

And that wasn't meant as a genuine question. That was just a "NO".

[Frank Bouwens]

I could find multiple flaws in that reasoning;
Most obviously,
• being a newbie at Kotlin, doesn’t mean you lose you Java expert status. (You can be both)
• When experienced with Java, you won’t start out as noob with Kotlin. You hit the ground running.
Seems you made a right choice to find a different supervisor!

[Stefan Oltmann]

Exactly. That's what I responded and iterated again on Nullability, better Std lib, and so on.
Wasn't going anywhere.

The company continues writing new Java code and hiring Java folks - just without me now. 🙂

[Edoardo Luppi]

"Stefan, why the heck should I turn 15 Java experts into 15 Kotlin newbies?"

Honestly if someone can't be up to speed with Kotlin after a week - coming from Java - there are other problems apart from the language switch.

[Meet]

I think many people not know kotlin also use machine learning and ai. I also youtube search machine learning topic many YouTuber use python because YouTuber only know python. May be in future kotlin more use in ai development

[Meet]

One more thing kotlin learner does not know about the kotlin slack community. I also 3 year after kotlin slack joined it. So I think the issue was people know kotlin is only use app development. Other development we use other language.

[Severiano Jaramillo]

One reason why Kotlin adoption is a lot higher for Android devs is that the Kotlin features that we can use are far superior than Java's because we are stuck at an old Java version. On the backend side, projects can use newer versions of Java.

[Stefan Oltmann]

Also Kotlin is the official recommend language for Android projects. There is no such recommendation for enterprise backend projects.