Comment by reducesuffering
4 years ago
No I would not add Kotlin to Google's credit. All the initial work and exponential adoption started with JetBrains. Google only greenlit it as an official Android dev language eventually (barring whatever OSS work they're doing on it only now).
Google is surely pumping lots of money into Kotlin, had it not been for them, and Kotlin would just be yet another runner up in the long list of JVM guest languages.
It is also due to Android Studio performance issues that Kotlin compiler improvements came to be, and also the compiler plugins for stuff like kapt and Jetpack Composer.
Android Java might be stagnant, not kept up to date with standard Java, yet it still rules in Studio tooling performance.