I'm looking a lot at Kotlin. It's not mature yet: JetBrains will start using it this summer for their own projects and I expect it to firm up a lot then.
The nice thing about Kotlin is almost perfect compatibility with Java, and an auto-translator that doesn't suck. So you can take an existing Java codebase and auto translate class by class, maintaining compilability the whole time. Also the standard library is mostly a set of extensions to the JDK so your existing library knowledge ports across, except you keep finding useful goodies sprinkled all over the place.
Feature-wise Kotlin has things that I feel would help me write fewer bugs: it has null-safety encoded into the type system, smart casts, extension methods, some good functional programming support, powerful properties and so on. There are features it lacks too, but I hope JetBrains will continue to push it forward for many years.
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I'm looking a lot at Kotlin. It's not mature yet: JetBrains will start using it this summer for their own projects and I expect it to firm up a lot then.
The nice thing about Kotlin is almost perfect compatibility with Java, and an auto-translator that doesn't suck. So you can take an existing Java codebase and auto translate class by class, maintaining compilability the whole time. Also the standard library is mostly a set of extensions to the JDK so your existing library knowledge ports across, except you keep finding useful goodies sprinkled all over the place.
Feature-wise Kotlin has things that I feel would help me write fewer bugs: it has null-safety encoded into the type system, smart casts, extension methods, some good functional programming support, powerful properties and so on. There are features it lacks too, but I hope JetBrains will continue to push it forward for many years.
They already use it. There was a Kotlin talk where they mentioned some plugins are now being written in it.