[jinst8gmi]

Yeah, Kotlin looks largely like a simpler, stripped down version of Scala. It's a lot closer to Scala than it is to Java, but it's close enough to Java devs to not have to put in much effort to learn vs learning Scala. I prefer Scala, but not everyone wants to invest the time to learn it in order to gain maybe 25% more expressiveness. Kotlin also seems like a better fit for Android than Scala (and Java for that matter).

[justthistime_]

In what sense is it closer to Scala? It's more like a slightly nicer Java: All Kotlin code can be translated back to Java (with some boilerplate), but almost no Scala code could be expressed gracefully in Kotlin (or Java).

[jinst8gmi]

Not everything in Scala can be cleanly translated into Java, but Kotlin looks more like a subset of Scala than it does a superset of Java. The syntax is very close.