> If it wasn't for Google giving wind to their sails, the Kotlin ship wouldn't have gone anywhere.

I disagree. While the Google announcement to officially support Kotlin surely gave it a big boost, Kotlin was already in widespread use for Android development well before Google announced their support for it in May 2017. Additionally, it was also gaining traction for server side development since before the Google announcement. I had been evaluating Kotlin closely during this time, and made the decision to start using Kotlin in our (primarily Java and entirely server-side) company codebase in late 2016 because I was already convinced Kotlin had a bright future. We weren't the only ones who thought this, I was tracking multiple other companies in our space (financial tech) that were evaluating and/or already moving to it too.

As much as Scala, or any other alternative language. You have to thank some certain Kotlin advocates for Google's decision.

https://talkingkotlin.com/the-first-kotlin-commit-in-android...

Kotlin is gaining momentum outside of Android, which is the only platform that Google helped with. In other areas, like Flutter, Google is actually competing with Kotlin (KMM).

Wishful thinking, enjoy your 8%.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022/

So Kotlin is already more popular than Scala and now the most used JVM language except Java itself, and is used almost as much as Java 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 combined. Not sure you should be that dismissive..

Nope, Kotlin is behind Scala on reaching the peek of the adoption curve.

Nice play there with the Java version numbers, it is still Java.

You have poor reading comprehension (in addition to a real hatred for one particular language, which seems unhealthy). I never stated that it was among the most popular languages, just that it was gaining momentum.

In 2019, 41% of Kotlin devs claimed to work on web back-ends. In 2020 it was 47%. In 2021 the survey changed wording but "server-side development" had increased to 52% of Kotlin devs.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/kotlin/

Ah, a survey from the company whose goal is to sell Kotlin, really conclusive.

sorry that's not it, Kotlin was created as a better Java, and is growing out of that niche. If it wasn't for Android, Kotlin is still a good back end language, especially with so much JVM stuff that isn't going anywhere soon out there.

> If it wasn't for Android, Kotlin is still a good back end language

It certainly would. Like so many other JVM languages. Android is what makes kotlin stand out from that crowd.

Arguably "particularly well supported by IntelliJ" is another thing that makes kotlin stand out from the crowd, but that's a two-edged sword. I'd expect the average JVM person to see that as roughly a tie between a quality and a cost (more lock-in).

I don't see any alternative JVM language competing with Kotlin right now to even have options. Scala 3 is in a very different space. Before Kotlin 1, scala 3 was no where near release. I remember eclipse X10, which was like a "transpiler for java" but it wasn't as ambitious as Kotlin with multiplatform planned.