For those who came in late, Kotlin is an open source statically typed programing language that targets the JVM, Android, JavaScript (transpiling to ES5.1) and native platforms (via LLVM). JetBrains, the company that created it, contends Kotlin is more concise and more type-safe than Java.

Now computer scientists Bruno Gois Mateus and Matias Martinez, affiliated with University of Valenciennes in France said Kotlin had infiltrated more than 17 per?ent of Android apps developed with its IDE, Android Studio 3.0.

They estimate that apps written in Kotlin require about 40 percent less code than they would with Java. With fewer lines of code, in theory, one can expect fewer bugs.

In a paper with he catchy title "An Empirical Study on Quality of Android Applications written in Kotlin language", Mateus and Martinez describe how they gathered 925 apps from the open source F-Droid repository, measured the amount of Kotlin code in each, and analyzed the code for "smells" as an indicator of code quality.