Preface

The idea of Kotlin was conceived at JetBrains in 2010. By that time, JetBrains was an established vendor of development tools for many languages, including Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and PHP. IntelliJ IDEA, the Java IDE that is our flagship product, also included plugins for Groovy and Scala.

The experience of building the tooling for such a diverse set of languages gave us a unique understanding of and perspective on the language design space as a whole. And yet the IntelliJ Platform-based IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, were still being developed in Java. We were somewhat envious of our colleagues on the .NET team who were developing in C#, a modern, powerful, rapidly evolving language. But we didn’t see any language that ...

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