I spent some time looking at a relatively unknown programming language called Kotlin today. Kotlin was designed by a company rather than by academics in a computer science department. The company happens to make and sell an IDE so perhaps they are hoping that as the language becomes more popular and programmers need an IDE to use it they will become customers of JetBrains, the company behind Kotlin.
The basic description of the language goes like this: Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine
Kotlin is yet another language that compiles down to other bytecode "languages". It can even compile to JavaScript so that it can be run in browsers or V8. Thus it is a lot like Scala (which normally compiles for the JVM but also has a compiler to JavaScript).
It aims to fix many of the problems of Java, yet be usable by mere mortal coders unlike Scala.
Whereas Java programs can only be object-oriented, Kotlin can have simple procedures as well.
Since the main compile target is the JVM, Kotlin makes the most sense as a Java replacement, e.g. for Android development. Google is now supporting this internally.
Kotlin does not make sense for web development or systems programming.