Kotlin programming language is originated from St.Petersburg and named after the Kotlin Island situated near Russian cultural capital. It is a statically typed open-source language created by JetBrains. Even though the language was introduced in 2011, the peak of its popularity is associated with Kotlin’s announcement by Google as the officially supported 1st-class development language for Android. It is worth to mention that before this announcement, the prime language for Android development was Java. Nevertheless, some leading tech companies took advantage of Kotlin programming before its global recognition and official support.
The primary reason for Kotlin’s creation was the fact that programmers who used C++ and Java were not fully satisfied with a very complex syntax of these languages. Before Kotlin was introduced, there was at least one attempt to find a solution, which resulted in the emergence of the Scala language. Although Scala solved certain problems associated with C++ and Java complexity, it was still quite complicated. So the next attempt was made by JetBrains — a cutting-edge software vendor with a wealth of experience in the creation of development tools for various programming languages. It took 7 years for the company to develop simple and user-friendly Kotlin language.
When comparing Kotlin vs Java, we see that the syntax of the first is not compatible with the second. Nevertheless, Kotlin can work with Java as well as it does natively. The greatest distinction between these two languages is that Kotlin uses aggressive inference when determining types of values and expressions in case they were not clearly stated.
There are some strong reasons why Kotlin for Android developers is known for being one of the preferable languages, and here are just some of them:
Kotlin’s codebase is known for being clear and compact, so developers using Kotlin have more chances to fix all errors before runtime.
Kotlin language is known for being an ideal technology for the development of Android solutions, and for good reason. In addition to a number of significant benefits that were listed above, the Kotlin team and community offers thousands of ready-made solutions that allow extending Kotlin’s standard functionality, and here are just a couple of them:
This compiler extension provides the ability to replace a findViewById() calls in a code with synthetic compiler-generated properties.
This library allows using Kotlin-friendly wrappers around the Android APIs. What is more, the library provides the ability to replace layout .xml files with Kotlin code.