Wonder why Kotlin is taking off while Clojure didn...

# language-proposals

[louiscad]

Wonder why Kotlin is taking off while Clojure didn't so much... I personally really like Kotlin features, and don't find it bloated. BTW, I really like inline methods, and noinline can be useful for all the real world tricky use cases

[poohbar]

@louiscad The Kotlin adoption has been about as slow as Clojure, check out tags on Stack Overflow or search trends on Google Trends

[louiscad]

This doesn't necessarily reflect real usage since searches for help don't reflect real usage. For example, I search less for Kotlin stuff than for Java stuff, even though I code 100% Kotlin now

[poohbar]

You can't say there is no correlation though. I think the bias would be on Kotlin's side because most people are currently learning thus searching more.

[dmitry.petrov]

Clojure is a sort of niche language, just as Frege, for example.
Doesn't mean it's bad. It's just not apples-to-apples.

[poohbar]

Sure, so it's not super reassuring that Kotlin has still some work to do to be significantly more used than Clojure

[poohbar]

and Louis, the only reason why Kotlin is so widely adopted on Android is that Android does not support Java 8

[dmitry.petrov]

Yeah, yeah 🧌

[poohbar]

ok, maybe not the ONLY reason 😄

[dmitry.petrov]

In practice, Kotlin is a sort of a niche language, too: a "better Java" for projects with existing Java codebases.

[poohbar]

Yup, and since there is a lot of existing Java codebases that's a pretty good way to grow..

[dmitry.petrov]

And of cause, it's not as elegant as a "concept" language designed from a scratch (e.g., Clojure as a "Lisp for JVM").