Comment by toyg
12 days ago
> Anyone trying to make a new mainstream language is completely insane, unless they're backed by a huge corporation. There are only two exceptions in the last 25 years that come close: Scala and Kotlin
Kotlin was designed and backed by JetBrains from the start. Maybe not a "huge" corporation but a pretty big company still (by revenue).
I don't know the story of how the Android team went Kotlin-first. If that wasn't a deliberate plan they got quite lucky. Could Kotlin arguably be backed by Google?
Android Studio is based on IntelliJ and there's a lot of collaboration between both teams. The adoption of Kotlin was a logical next step, considering a lot of IntelliJ is written in Kotlin.
No, the Android community adopted Kotlin before Google added any support for it from their side.
I don't know when the first Kotlin Android app was published, but Kotlin 1.0 was released in 2016 and then announced as a first class language at Google I/O in 2017.