Perception and effects of implementing Kotlin in existing projects : A case study about language adoption

Abstract: The Kotlin programming language has seen an increase of adoption since its launch in 2011. In late 2017 Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on the Android platform which further popularized the language. With this increase in popularity we felt it was interesting to investigate how Kotlin affects the developer experience. We performed a case study to see how Java developers perceive the Kotlin language, and how it meets the requirements of these developers. To gather the developer requirements and their perception of Kotlin we performed two sets of interviews and rewrote parts of their codebase. The first set of interviews identified developer requirements and the second set of interviews showcased the Kotlin language and its potential use in their codebase. The results show that Kotlin can meet most of the developer requirements and that the perception of Kotlin is positive. Kotlin’s ability to be incrementally adopted was a prominent feature which reduced the inherent risks of technology adoption while providing them the ability to further evaluate the language. The expressiveness of a programming language has previously been found to be a prominent factor of language adoption. In this study, we identified the expressive nature of Kotlin as a major factor of its adoption potential.