Re:The Kotlin Foundation
by johnnycerberus on Saturday February 13, 2021 @11:31AM
(#26124526)
Kotlin never appealed to backend developers (based on job ads, new open-source projects in the domain). Data pipelines, concurrency and streaming are becoming more and more part of what a backend dev should know. Instead, I've noticed that Scala is used in many systems where Java historically was less ergonomic for the task. Spark, Delta, Deequ, Scio, Finagle, Flink, Kafka, the Typelevel & ZIO ecosystems, Akka are some of the examples. Using Kotlin as a sugary interface to Spring Boot? Maybe for some that would be an incentive.
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Kotlin is taking off on the backend. It took a little longer than some people might have hoped but all the big boys are doing backend development in Kotlin now. Square/Netflix/Uber/Twitter/AirBnB all traditionally Java houses have adopted Kotlin in one way or another.
Scala on the other hand is facing a decline. Less so in Big Data where it is still doing well but I find increasingly it's not being chosen for new backend development.
By the same big boys that were so big into Scala 5 years ago,.....
Kafka (or rather Confluent) is actually moving parts of its code base to Java.
I think a big part of the appeal of Kotlin was that Scala was impractical for use on Android so Kotlin slid in as "the missing pieces" of Java.
Yeah also somewhere after Java 7 (I think) Java stagnated because the next version was too ambitious (stuck in development-hell). To get back on track they cut a bunch of features, labelled it Java 8 and moved Jigsaw (the biggest hurdle) to Java 9. After this they also moved to the fixed release cycles.
Java stagnated because Google torpedoed Sun, left it sink without bothering to own Sun, Oracle was the only one that bothered to keep their buy offer (IBM withdrew theirs), and and to spend a couple of years setting the house straight.
Yet, there are no FOSS language that matches JIT and GC capabilities of the JVM.
Looking forward to the KVM, if Kotlin is so great.
Because Google as Kotlin's Godfather is stagnating Android Java on purpose, on the proper JVM we don't have such constraints.
Can't really blame Google for deciding to move away from Java after the Oracle lawsuit.