Apparently Project Kotlin is a new JVM based language ala Scala developed by Jetbrains. We all know jetbrains from the excellent products they make. Like Resharper and IntelliJ.

With Kotlin, we’re building upon the many years of experience creating development tools for different languages, and hoping to provide a language which is productive enough for today’s environment and at the same time simple enough for the ordinary programmer to learn.

Kotlin should go Beta by the end of the year.

And here are some reasons why to look forward to it.

make it safer than Java, i.e. statically check for common pitfalls such as null pointer dereference,
make it more concise than Java by supporting variable type inference, higher-order functions (closures), extension functions, mixins and first-class delegation, etc;
and, keeping the useful level of expressiveness (see above), make it way simpler than the most mature competitor – Scala.

And a language can not be complete without a hello world example.

You can already find lots of information about it on their documentation pages.

As the vulcans would say, Live long and prosper Project Kotlin.