Google is doubling down on its support of the Kotlin language for Android mobile development, with the recommendation that all new Android projects be developed in Kotlin, the JVM-based alternative to Java. But while Android development will become “Kotlin-first,” Java and C++ will continue to be supported.
With Kotlin, there is less to type, less to test, and less to maintain, said Chet Haase, who leads the Android UI team at Google, at the Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, CA. Unlike Java, Kotlin doesn’t require developers to write large amounts of “boilerplate” code. Haase even joked that developers’ typing skills might even be eroding because of this.
