# Kotlin 187 Hacker News commenters recommended Kotlin and 69 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 1.4 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A concise, strongly typed JVM language with built-in null safety and smooth Java interop, though critics call it complex and Android-centric and say modern Java has caught up. ## Why people recommend it - Strong types and null safety (8 comments): "It's a less clunky Java. The syntax is IMHO Ruby-level charming (for an OO-first lang), but with types that are quite a bit stronger than Java." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252153)) "Strongly typed, more concise than Java or Go (and probably Typescript), less likely to blow up at runtime than Typescript, epic tooling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100883)) "Kotlin is actually a pretty nice language, especially compared to Java. I love how they have null checking as a central feature." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981171)) - Far less verbose than Java (6 comments): "It's a less clunky Java. The syntax is IMHO Ruby-level charming (for an OO-first lang), but with types that are quite a bit stronger than Java." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252153)) "Strongly typed, more concise than Java or Go (and probably Typescript), less likely to blow up at runtime than Typescript, epic tooling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100883)) "Kotlin is actually a pretty nice language, especially compared to Java. I love how they have null checking as a central feature." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981171)) - Seamless two-way Java interop (3 comments): "The two-way interop is one of Kotlin's advantages as it makes porting code from Java to Kotlin easier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742376)) "Kotlin, in all honesty, is the first reasonable and very useful thing to come to the JRE ecosystem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645135)) "Kotlin has explicit interoperability with Java exactly to make it easy for Java devs to "upgrade"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516012)) - Multiplatform and official for Android (4 comments): "However Kotlin has Google's as godfather, want to develop for Android with the official tools? Kotlin it is." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48878785)) "Kotlin has a better future than Scala, beyond the JVM, because papa Google has ensured it happens" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108666)) "JetBrains has done a pretty good job of creating something that can fill many different niches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231318)) ## What people warn about - Too many features and abstractions (5 comments): "It pretends to fix things that haven't been problems in Java for more than 10 years while introducing a layer of syntactic complexity that's completely unwarranted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745187)) "Only other language that I think gets close to rust ergonomics is Kotlin, but it suffers from having too many possibilities for abstractions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994365)) "Kotlin is a terrible language for learning, as it has a lot syntactic shortcuts that are easy to mistake for magic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345459)) - Ecosystem dominated by Android (5 comments): "Kotlin is a nice language, though not nice enough to where I'd want to use it outside of Android." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355029)) "Maybe because my experience with Kotlin is restricted to Android, i didnt love that that much." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222527)) "as nice as the language is, the ecosystem was ... so utterly dominated by Android development, that he said he wouldn't recommend using it again" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183409)) - Modern Java has caught up (4 comments): "It pretends to fix things that haven't been problems in Java for more than 10 years while introducing a layer of syntactic complexity that's completely unwarranted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745187)) "It has pioneered several important features, but now the big brother has implemented them slightly differently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516767)) "Kotlin/JS is dead in the water, there's literally no reason to use it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752697)) - Lacks checked error handling (2 comments): "why is Kotlin implementing this in a non-JVM compatible way, instead of introducing checked exceptions with better language support?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736104)) "Kotlins nice, mutability in the collections and nullable types are nice but they still lack some form of checked error handling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623249)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Kotlin", https://hackerapproved.com/p/kotlin/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).