JetBrains is developing a new language called Kotlin for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). According to Dmitry Jemerov, JetBrains development lead, “We want a language set we can use ourselves to develop our IntelliJ Idea Java IDE, and when we started, there was no real option because we need a statically typed language and we need a language that we can understand and has good compilation performance and isn’t full of surprises that developers run into if we switch to this language.”
Kotlin should be about as easy to learn as Java, but it is “more expressive.” Also, because Kotlin is a statically typed language, Jemerov said it will be well-suited to “developing something large or more complicated, more performance-critical, perhaps a high-frequency trading application.”
