[Scarbutt]

I was asking myself the same question, then he wrote:

Kotlin manages to help you route around just about all of Android's Red Lights, and turns the experience into something that on the whole I now find superior to iOS development.

I haven't done any android and don't know kotlin either, so maybe someone here who does can expand on this.

[andybak]

And this paragraph:

> I was first in line to throw the Android book at the wall and give up last summer, but now with Kotlin I'm finding Android programming is, dare I say it -- enjoyable? I think this suggests that Android's "bad" APIs weren't all that bad to begin with, but rather that Java has been masking Android's neat functionality with a bunch of Java-y cruft.

[cromwellian]

I don't think it's Java fault per se, just the API design. Java8 streams, RxJava, BufferKnife injection, Guava, etc are pretty nice to use, especially in combination with Java8. There's no async/await, but if you use ReactiveX, you don't really need it.

Kotlin looks very nice, I'm just pointing out that if the Android View/Fragment lifecycle design is an issue, language design isn't the cause or solution, and most likely, you will need a middleware/facade to mitigate it.

[stevenwoo]

I don't know Kotlin but I have done both IOS and Android programming and they both have their plusses and minuses compared to each other. I am not a superstar programmer like Yegge, learned IOS first and Android seemed really weird coming from that background but I eventually grokked it and converted existing IOS app to Android, and next few apps we did I wrote it for Android first.

One key obstacle for me to get over is that some of the stuff one learns by attempting to learn through Google's documentation and copying their examples is pretty horrible in a non-toy app. IIRC I had to learn this the hard way by making an app and finding it getting geometrically harder in complexity when adding features one by one with image downloading async tied to activities and message passing from service to activity tied to message number/activity number.

[hota_mazi]

I think Steve is unjustly being harsh on the Android API, probably because he's not very experience with it, and I suspect that he'll be hard pressed to produce an example of an API that's completely ugly with Java but is somehow good with a Kotlin wrapper.