The programming language after Kotlin – with the creator of Kotlin

February 12, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: In-depth technical interview with a single guest, blending personal anecdotes, deep dives into language design, and forward-looking AI discussions.
The Key Players:
- Guest: Andrey Breslav, creator of Kotlin—a massively adopted language powering billions of Android devices. Famous for pragmatic innovations that fixed Java's verbosity while enabling seamless interoperability.
- Host: Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer podcast), probing with engineer-friendly questions on pains, processes, and future tech.
The Vibe: Educational and inspiring, with geeky excitement over code trivia, regrets, and AI disruption—fun for devs, intense on technical weeds.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Andrey Breslav**
2 (01:02) **Andrey's Early Career and Kotlin's Origin**
3 (04:23) **Java's Stagnation and Alternatives**
4 (12:07) **Initial Kotlin Design and Inspirations**
5 (16:26) **Core Pain Points and Feature Prioritization**
6 (21:03) **Naming Kotlin**
7 (24:36) **Key Differentiators from Java**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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Andrey Breslav is the creator of Kotlin and the founder of CodeSpeak, a new programming language that aims to reduce boilerplate by replacing trivial code with concise, plain-English descriptions. He led Kotlin’s design at JetBrains through its early releases, shaping both the language and its compiler as Kotlin grew into a core part of the Android ecosystem.

In this episode, we talk about what it takes to design and evolve a programming language in production. We discuss the influences behind Kotlin, the tradeoffs that shaped it, and why interoperability with Java became so central to its success.

Andrey also explains why he is building CodeSpeak as a response to growing code complexity in an era of LLM agents, and why he believes keeping humans in control of the software development lifecycle will matter even more as AI becomes more capable.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:02) Why Kotlin was created

(06:26) Dynamic vs. static languages

(09:27) Andrey joins the Kotlin project

(14:26) Designing a new language

(19:40) Frontend vs. Backend in language design

(21:05) Why is it named Kotlin?

(24:37) Kotlin vs. Java tradeoffs

(28:32) Null safety

(31:24) Kotlin’s influences

(39:12) Smartcasts

(40:42) Features Kotlin left out

(44:54) Bidirectional Java interoperability

(55:01) The Kotlin timeline

(58:00) Kotlin’s development process

(1:07:20) From Java to Android developers

(1:12:12) How Android became Kotlin-first

(1:18:20) CodeSpeak: a language for LLMs

(1:24:07) LLMs and new languages

(1:28:20) How software engineering is changing with AI

(1:36:12) Developer tools of the future

(1:39:00) Andrey’s advice for junior engineers and students

(1:42:32) Rapid fire round

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Cross-platform mobile development

• How