Hi guys i'm still hesitant on switching from java ...

# android

[J6ey]

Hi guys i'm still hesitant on switching from java to kotlin. Kotlin is still a beta language and the number of users still seems relatively low compared to java and since it first released. Do you guys really think kotlin is worth learning and will survive in the future?

[cedric]

Google would certainly disagree with you that Kotlin is a beta language 🙂

[Kris Wong]

not to mention certain Android components will be Kotlin only

[hetang]

my apps are fully Kotlin. this is current GitHub language states looks for Kotlin:

[hetang]

so I do not think its beta language any more

[J6ey]

Thank you guys for the clarification!

[Adam Powell]

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/10/android-dev-summit-2019-keynote.html

almost 60% of our top 1000 apps are using Kotlin

[Casey Brooks]

There are components and libraries of the core Kotlin ecosystem that are still in beta, but the language itself and its standard library is definitely production-ready. In particular, things around multiplatform and some coroutines features are still in beta. But you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’re just looking to replace Java and keep using the Java libraries you’re used to, that portion of Kotlin is very stable and growing very quickly

[Casey Brooks]

Here are a few more thoughts I have on this topic: https://dev.to/cjbrooks12/comment/7g2o

[cedric]

That thread has some gems:

Scala, which is a functional language inspired by Lisp.

[cedric]

or the claim that Clojure has better interop with Java than Kotlin because you never need to cast (author forgetting that Clojure is dynamically typed I assume)

[louiscad]

Quantity < Quality

[tseisel]

In fact, Kotlin is one of the languages that registered the fastest growth this year. Of course it doesn't have more users than Java (but no programming language has !)
I can't see the future, but Kotlin is likely to survive (as it has been endorsed by Google for Android Development), and IMHO it could even remplace Java in the next 10 years (because it compiles to the JVM, but also to JS and Native).
At worst it'll be a Android-only language and at best it will kill Java and take over the programming world. We'll see.

[louiscad]

Kotlin can't die anyway, it's open source, and has a big and fast growing community. Its current feature-set is already vastly superior to many other programming languages, and upcoming things like HMPP (hierarchical multiplatform) will only make it more desirable for many projects.