In 2015, he prepared a document to explain to his bosses at Square why they should sign-off on his Kotlin use. 'Once you start using the language you can tell it was built by someone who spent a lot of time programming in Java,' Wharton says. One of them, Jake Wharton, an Android engineer at payments company Square, has been following Kotlin since its beginning. The company released a preview version of the language in 2011, and it turned out many other people were looking for something along those lines. Perhaps more importantly, JetBrains benefits from giving away Kotlin for free in the form of feedback and improvements from the larger Java community. JetBrains doesn't profit directly from Kotlin's use among developers, but the company hopes to make money off of it through increased interest in their Kotlin-supporting core products. And instead of keeping the project internal, JetBrains open-sourced the project. So the JetBrains team built their own language that had all the features they wanted and a strong focus on compatibility with Java.

'Kotlin is what our development community has already asked for,' Android product manager Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson said during the announcement of Kotlin support at Google's IO conference in May. 'Working with it just brings a smile to your face,' says Christina Lee, an Android developer at Pinterest and Kotlin enthusiast.Ĭompanies like Pinterest, Basecamp, and Square had already been using it, but now that it has the official support of Google, you can expect to find Kotlin in more and more places. But it's even better news for programmers, because it means spending more time working on the interesting parts of code and less on more routine matters-the things that make programming a rewarding career or hobby. That's good news for users because it should translate into apps with fewer bugs and crashes. This means programmers can write safer, more reliable code with less work. In May Google gave Android developers another option when it announced it would start supporting a new programming language called Kotlin, which offers most of the same basic features as Java plus the coding equivalent of seat warmers and a killer sound system.

If it were a car, Java would feature a fast, reliable engine but not antilock brakes, power steering, or cup holders. You'll find millions of apps in the Google Play store, many of them written using the powerful, stable, workhorse programming language Java.

Kotlin languages