> If it wasn't for Google giving wind to their sails, the Kotlin ship wouldn't have gone anywhere.
I disagree. While the Google announcement to officially support Kotlin surely gave it a big boost, Kotlin was already in widespread use for Android development well before Google announced their support for it in May 2017. Additionally, it was also gaining traction for server side development since before the Google announcement. I had been evaluating Kotlin closely during this time, and made the decision to start using Kotlin in our (primarily Java and entirely server-side) company codebase in late 2016 because I was already convinced Kotlin had a bright future. We weren't the only ones who thought this, I was tracking multiple other companies in our space (financial tech) that were evaluating and/or already moving to it too.
I disagree. While the Google announcement to officially support Kotlin surely gave it a big boost, Kotlin was already in widespread use for Android development well before Google announced their support for it in May 2017. Additionally, it was also gaining traction for server side development since before the Google announcement. I had been evaluating Kotlin closely during this time, and made the decision to start using Kotlin in our (primarily Java and entirely server-side) company codebase in late 2016 because I was already convinced Kotlin had a bright future. We weren't the only ones who thought this, I was tracking multiple other companies in our space (financial tech) that were evaluating and/or already moving to it too.