Re: Lock-in
As I said, nothing against Kotlin. It's just an observation that these platform holders are trying to make it harder to write portable code.
Apple wants you to use Swift. Google wants you to use Kotlin. Microsoft wants you to use C#. While they may provide support for alternatives, it's almost always inferior to what they want you to use.
I also think Java has become a victim of its own success. Oracle *can't* change the language much even if they wanted to. Too much code already runs on it to change the language. That's probably why they opened up the JVM to properly support things like Scala, Groovy, Python (Jython) and now Kotlin which can interoperate with Java without requiring existing code to be rewritten.
I think Kotlin plans to be rid of the JVM entirely though. They already have a Kotlin native in beta and I assume the plan is to dump dependencies on Java completely at some point.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
