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Android Now Supports the Kotlin Programming Language (venturebeat.com)
In addition to Java and C++, Google announced at its I/O 2017 conference today that Android is gaining official support for the Kotlin programming language. VentureBeat reports: Kotlin is developed by JetBrains, the same people who created IntelliJ. Google describes Kotlin, which is an open sourced project under the Apache 2.0 license, as "a brilliantly designed, mature language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun." The company notes that some have already adopted the programming language for their production apps, including Expedia, Flipboard, Pinterest, and Square. There are already many enthusiastic Kotlin developers for Android, and the company says it is simply listening to what the community wants. But Google's choice didn't just come down to the team believing Kotlin will make writing Android apps easier. Developers will be happy to know that Kotlin's compiler emits Java byte-code. Kotlin can call Java, and Java can call Kotlin. Indeed, "the effortless interoperation between the two languages" was a large part of Kotlin's appeal to the Android team. This means you can add as little or as much Kotlin into your existing codebase as you want, mixing the two languages freely within the same project. Calling out to Kotlin code from Java code should just work, while calling to Java code requires some automatically applied translation conventions.
I've been using Kotlin for Android development for a while now. It's not a passing fad, and it may one day overtake Java in many things. It's just Java with additional desperately needed features.
I've heard no one whine about Swift being the flavor of the week, and yet, if you compare the languages, they are almost the same language with some slight syntactic differences. Both have null-safe typing. Both have lambdas quickly accessible. Both have extension functions. Both have interfaces that can contain default implementations. Both have getters/setters.
The only difference is that Swift was basically forced upon the iOS world, while Kotlin had to earn its place.
So I click the first link "concise" and it shows me how to make a singleton. I thought singletons have basically been declared to be an anti-pattern. They're basically a name for an obfusticated global and make testing difficult.
Not very inspiring to see a bad example as the first introduction to the language. It doesn't give much confidence that the team making the language actually gets bets practices.