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My personal opinion is because Swift has turned into an "us too" language. There's a large rush for all popular language ecosystems to rush to whatever trendy d

My personal opinion is because Swift has turned into an "us too" language. There's a large rush for all popular language ecosystems to rush to whatever trendy development exists in language design now days to retain the momentum of community. I write/maintain a decent amount of code in Swift these days. I'm proficient in some parts of it, clueless in others. Like Kotlin, and Javascript, and even Python to some degree (I do a lot of Kotlin and Python too), these multi paradigm languages are sort of a "use it however you want." There's no unifying simplicity in them. So it becomes a race to the bottom of utility. Why use Swift, when it looks and feels like so many other languages, and when it's clear the rate of the changes in it will primarily benefit Apple? To be clear, I don't hate Swift at all, I like some bits of it, it's just that there's no real draw for me to play with out side of the Apple eco system. If Apple made it so that I could use it write Android apps with it (kinda like Dart is supposed to be), I would be much more excited about. If Swift was dedicated to a small set of unifying principles (kinda like Elixir), I could get more excited about it.

bmc7505 5y ago
For the record, Kotlin was open sourced Feb. 13th, 2012 [1]. Swift was open sourced Dec. 3rd, 2015 [2]. So while the first commits happened just a few months apart [3, 4] and these languages may have shared similar influences, Kotlin predates Swift by almost four years in the open. Perhaps their ideas simply were in the air ten years ago, but I think it would be unfair to insinuate that either language was in a "rush to whatever trendy development exists in language design". [1]: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/02/kotlin-goes-open-source-2/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/02/kotlin-goes-open-s... [2]: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 [3]: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/369b1974782b821e44b7aa6cd68e2e41eb2ba036 https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/369b1974782b821e4... [4]: https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5de02db138d3d487eeb https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5...
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  I was not trying to imply that they stole from each other. Kotlin may have been around longer, but it did not enjoy the early momentum and energy that was granted because of Apple's energetic adoption and marketing. JetBrains didn't have the early resources to dump into Kotlin at first like Apple gave to Swift. In fact, I would posit, that if Swift had not gotten a giant kick off from Apple, Google may have never felt so compelled to support Kotlin like they did. They may have been fine "just do it with Java, or you can use JetBrains stuff if you want" indifferent attitude that existed for much of the early life of Kotlin. Both languages want to remain objecty. But have added "systems" features. And are more functional. And more asyncish. And more actorish. More saftey-ish. So on and so forth.
  - bmc7505 5y ago
    Again, I would put it very differently. Despite having a fraction of the audience and resources of a multi-trillion-dollar company, and despite a long list of competing languages, JetBrains had the foresight to invest and innovate in the language design space. I think it's a testament to Kotlin's ergonomics, unrivaled tooling-support and interoperability with Java's ecosystem that it became so widely popular among the Android community. Amidst Kotlin's growing popularity and mounting legal pressure from Oracle, Google realized they could no longer ignore it and finally adopted their Kotlin-first strategy in 2019. [1] [1]: https://developer.android.com/kotlin/first https://developer.android.com/kotlin/first
    - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
      Yeah Google has never said it but I think it's widely assumed Google pushed Kotlin as a hedge during their never-ending Java lawsuit with Oracle.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Or it became so “widely popular” (hardly outside android circles) because android java is capped at around java 8 features, while we are at 17.

bmc7505 5y ago

For the record, Kotlin was open sourced Feb. 13th, 2012 [1]. Swift was open sourced Dec. 3rd, 2015 [2]. So while the first commits happened just a few months apart [3, 4] and these languages may have shared similar influences, Kotlin predates Swift by almost four years in the open. Perhaps their ideas simply were in the air ten years ago, but I think it would be unfair to insinuate that either language was in a "rush to whatever trendy development exists in language design". [1]: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/02/kotlin-goes-open-source-2/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/02/kotlin-goes-open-s... [2]: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 [3]: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/369b1974782b821e44b7aa6cd68e2e41eb2ba036 https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/369b1974782b821e4... [4]: https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5de02db138d3d487eeb https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5...

travisgriggs 5y ago
I was not trying to imply that they stole from each other. Kotlin may have been around longer, but it did not enjoy the early momentum and energy that was granted because of Apple's energetic adoption and marketing. JetBrains didn't have the early resources to dump into Kotlin at first like Apple gave to Swift. In fact, I would posit, that if Swift had not gotten a giant kick off from Apple, Google may have never felt so compelled to support Kotlin like they did. They may have been fine "just do it with Java, or you can use JetBrains stuff if you want" indifferent attitude that existed for much of the early life of Kotlin. Both languages want to remain objecty. But have added "systems" features. And are more functional. And more asyncish. And more actorish. More saftey-ish. So on and so forth.
- bmc7505 5y ago
  Again, I would put it very differently. Despite having a fraction of the audience and resources of a multi-trillion-dollar company, and despite a long list of competing languages, JetBrains had the foresight to invest and innovate in the language design space. I think it's a testament to Kotlin's ergonomics, unrivaled tooling-support and interoperability with Java's ecosystem that it became so widely popular among the Android community. Amidst Kotlin's growing popularity and mounting legal pressure from Oracle, Google realized they could no longer ignore it and finally adopted their Kotlin-first strategy in 2019. [1] [1]: https://developer.android.com/kotlin/first https://developer.android.com/kotlin/first
  - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
    Yeah Google has never said it but I think it's widely assumed Google pushed Kotlin as a hedge during their never-ending Java lawsuit with Oracle.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Or it became so “widely popular” (hardly outside android circles) because android java is capped at around java 8 features, while we are at 17.