Announcing the State of Kotlin survey

We are proud to announce the first ever State of Kotlin survey!

In December, I embarked on a project to chart the usage and adoption of the Kotlin programming language among developers worldwide.

Kotlin was created by JetBrains in 2011 to use in their IDEs and tooling. It quickly captured hearts and minds of developers in the Java and Android ecosystems, for its modern approach, and easy interoperability with Java. Since May 2017, it’s also officially been supported by Google for Android development.

There are a few things we wanted to explore with the survey: first, we wanted to learn how developers use Kotlin, either at work or in their side projects, what got them into Kotlin, and resources they use for learning: talks, blogposts, books, courses, or something else entirely?

Secondly, we were interested in knowing how some of Kotlin’s most interesting features, like the coroutines and extension functions, are being adopted and used.

Our inspiration was the State of JS, a brilliant resource for analysing the most popular features and tools in the JavaScript ecosystem. We were driven to do this survey by sheer curiosity, and wanting to give something back to the community.

We use Kotlin for all our new Android SDK development at Pusher – including Push Notifications, and Chatkit, and the developer community is great in providing valuable insight and forging best practices.

We are planning to release the results of the survey in a few weeks’ time – most likely in March. My hope for this survey is that it will help drive adoption in organisations and teams that are still undecided on whether to use it.

We are also running a prize draw for the survey responders – a trip to KotlinConf organised by JetBrains (the brains behind the language) – in Amsterdam between 3 – 5 October 2018.

The prize includes a ? conference ticket, ✈️ flights, and ? accommodation in Amsterdam for the duration of the conference.

As a bonus – here are a few nuggets of preliminary results from the survey:

• Android is dominant, with over 80% of people answering they use it for Android.
• It should come to no surprise that over 40% of people started learning Kotlin after the Google I/O announcement in May 2017.
• People dig null safety, extension functions, and data classes.
• A quarter of responders believe that the use of K when naming tools and libraries should be kompulsory, while 11% disagree with that statement.

If you’re interested in Kotlin and invested in the community I invite you to enter the survey by following this link:

The survey will be open until 10 March 2018.