Android Studio 3.0 Preview Release: Kotlin, Java 8 Features

[DanLamb]

In a way we can thank Oracle for forcing Google to adopt OpenJDK; because it means that a lot of JVM languages might start to be viable for app development. I wonder if Clojure, Scala, Jython, or JRuby are on the table.

Oracle, or previously Sun, very actively encouraged and even supported non-Java languages for the JVM. They financed JRuby at one time but later backed out. I think Jython too?

The Oracle JDK team has been taking the needs and limitations on non-Java languages seriously in the development of Java 7/8/9, and onwards. If you read the jdk mailing lists, they know there are older mistakes in the Java language that backward compatibility prevents major changes of or compromises that they had to made but they try to make sure the JDK itself doesn't limit other languages.

Also, other JVM languages like Scala are possible with Android, but it's not easy, and I would avoid it.

Kotlin really went out of their way to cater specifically to making Android development easy. And now, it is getting 100% Google support. I like the Scala language better, but if I were doing high level Android development, I would use Kotlin. When I do high performance REST servers, Spark apps, or Kafka apps, I prefer Scala, which is where the Scala team have really targeted making their tools excellent.