[ufmace]

I'm glad to hear Steve Yegge's take on Kotlin. I've played with it some and thought it was quite interesting, and I wouldn't mind doing a project in it sometime. Although I don't use Java much, I'm more into Rails for personal projects, and I'm not about to switch any of them to JVM just to play with Kotlin.

Anyways, I broadly agree with his take that it adds all of the cool toys you could ever want to Java without the difficulty and mental overhead of learning Clojure or Scala. Strong compatibility with the existing Java ecosystem seems like a plus, but I've never dug into it deep enough to notice that.

I did find myself really wanting to know what he figured out to make Android UI programming non-awful though. I've messed with it some, and I don't see how adding in Kotlin would make it much nicer. Maybe he loved Kotlin so much that he was able to forget about the Android UI API.