GitHub reports that Kotlin is currently the fastest growing programming language. It has also managed to impress the big tech companies such as Google, Capital One, Atlassian, Pinterest, and Square who have since come aboard it.
The programming language Kotlin was developed by JetBrains (a software tools company) in 2010. JetBrains came up with it as a workaround to the pain points in Java such as the ‘null pointer exceptions’ that is mostly the reason behind Java apps crashes.
Java has been the go-to programming language for a couple of decades now and grew to become quite popular. It is often used to develop Android apps and write databases. It was created by Sun Microsystems, which was later acquired by Oracle.
But over the years, developers have come to learn to make do, with the clunkiness of Java as a programming language. However, going forward, it appears Kotlin might unseat Java as it addresses the shortfalls in the latter. Android engineers, in particular, are warming up to this new programming language.
“Kotline in itself is a modern programming language. I’ve seen other features in Kotlin that make development more delightful. Kotline is easier to pick up and more expressive. Writing the same code in Kotlin usually results in fewer lines of codes,” said Valeriy Ovechkin, a software engineer with Square during an interview with Business Insider.
In just the last year, Kotlin popularity has risen by at least 2 ½ times. It was voted as one of the five most loved programming languages by Stack Overflow; a popular site among developers where they interact with each other over questions and answers on coding.
“What is interesting with Kotlin is basically it leverages the existing skills of Java developers and finds the right tradeoffs to provide new features and provide things that make Java developers more efficient without going too far,” said Sbastien Deleuze, a Pivotal engineer.
