The programming language after Kotlin – with the creator of Kotlin
From The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz
February 12, 2026 · 1h 44m
About this episode
In this episode, Andrey Breslav discusses the evolution of Kotlin and introduces his new programming language, CodeSpeak.
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (01:02) Why Kotlin was created (06:26) Dynamic vs. static…
People in this episode
Host: Gergely Orosz
Guest: Andrey Breslav
Topics covered
- programming languages
- Kotlin
- CodeSpeak
- software development
- AI in coding
Keywords
- Kotlin
- CodeSpeak
- programming language design
- software development
- AI
- Java interoperability
- boilerplate reduction
Sponsors
Statsig, Sonar, WorkOS
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Kotlin, JetBrains, CodeSpeak
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