While Clojure remains my favorite JVM language, I think Kotlin is the first language to have a fighting chance at replacing Java as an industry-wide blue-collar language. It doesn't try to solve programming's problems with new approaches like Clojure and Erlang; on the contrary - it's meant to let programmers continue thinking more or less as they have been thinking so far, but it has all the modern features and a good balance of power vs. ease of use/learning. It's what Java was 17 years ago.
Can you compare Kotlin with Ceylon [http://www.ceylon-lang.org/]? I'm very interested in what's the core/main difference between them and will be better in which use-cases.
I think the main difference is Java interop. Kotlin is fully compatible with Java and Java libraries, while Ceylon is not quite (the Ceylon FAQ says: "since Ceylon will be based on its own modular SDK, making a clean break from the legacy Java SDK, Ceylon will require new frameworks designed especially for Ceylon").
Well, this is a sensitive subject. Scala is no doubt more powerful and has some awesome features, but I'd say that Kotlin has 99% of the features 99% of Scala developers choose Scala for in the first place (in other words, those Scala features that Kotlin is missing are not the ones that made most Scala developers choose Scala), while it is far easier to learn (in its entirety). Also, IDE support is far superior, and will remain so (because some Scala features, like structural types, make some actions like refactoring impossible at times). Also, it compiles to Javascript as well as to Java bytecode.
Sorry I wasn't more specific. How does it compare with Scala's Java compatibility? I know that Java compatibility is one of Scala's strengths, but the more I read, it also seems like it's one of its biggest weaknesses.
Sometimes I just think Scala sucks at marketing – completely.
- I think that especially the adjustments and features in the upcoming Scala 2.10 address real-world requirements like performance, reflection and database access.
- Scala compiles to JavaScript for months already as well as .NET.
- I remember the claim regarding IDE support from the Kotlin presentation. JetBrain's own engineers disagreed with it. I think the jury is still out there.
For web apps, maybe. I often find it surprising to learn how unfamiliar web programmers are with the vast amount of non-web programming out there. And even in the web world, almost all heavy-duty middleware is JVM (or, sometimes, C++) based (see twitter, tumblr, Google, Facebook etc.)
It's a bit of a stretch to describe Google, Facebook and Twitter's engineers as "blue collar". Sophisticated middleware is hardly a blue collar domain, definitely more "white collar".
Yeah, you got a point there :) Nevertheless, there's lots of blue-collar programming done in Java in the enterprise world. Much, much more than Ruby/python/PHP.
