Discussion on "Why I abandoned Java in favour of Kotlin"

Jan Vladimir Mostert · 2016-11-01T12:45:38.184Z

I’ve always been a huge fan of Java. I started my career as a PHP developer and soon after that I was forced to work in perl in another project. With PHP’s consistent brokenness throughout the language and perl’s (alphabet-soup-puke)-like-syntax, ...

Interesting! Java has long been a classic but great to see such a great comparision!

That was awesome, although i am not a java developer, i am going to give Kotlin a try.

I used to code in Java for a couple years and really never had any love for it. I did find JavaScript to be much more fun for me, although it is lacking in many aspects as a robust language. Python was something that really had my attention but still to me was not complete when comparing to Java. Kotlin really caught my eye and actually got me back into the Java realm.

Great article about some of the many questions I have been looking up answers for.

Java does get somewhat tedious if you're used to working in Python Strong typing is the biggest thing I missed from Python, that I now get in Kotlin

I am really starting to like kotlin. I did have one quesion. Does it use the Java API? So I could import any Java API library and use it in my Kotlin program or does Kotlin use its own API?

Kotlin is 100% compatible with Java with Java's standard classes heavily extended via the Standard Library to give you more functionality.

Example, in Java you can do "blah".isEmpty(), in Kotlin you can do that as well, but also do "blah".isNotEmpty() since the standard lib extends the String class via method extensions.

So everything Java is available to you in Kotlin, plus the Kotlin add-ons.

What material would you suggest for learning?

Great one... No audio visual yet?

I believe there's some good tutorials on YouTube, but haven't seen anything yet on the online university-type sites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpPbCWpBM3I

probably you have an error here ;)

    if (user1.compareTo(user2) > 1)

Indeed, that should be > 0. If it was Kotlin, I would not have made that mistake.

"Smart casting in Kotlin" is biased. In Java there's no need to cast objects to Password nor to Username since getValue method is declared in the base class. In order to improve the example, some methods specific to Password and Username should be added.

Can you "invent" some method for Username as well?

getValue() can easily be replaced with getMaskedValue() to make the example more clear. Updated :-)

Interesting. Reminds me of some of the similar reasons Groovy was created.

I'm not that familiar with Groovy .. is Groovy also mixed paradigm OO + Functional ? I know that Groovy is not strongly typed whereas Kotlin gives you type inferance like Scala does.

When I was using Groovy, it wasn't functional, and while it didn't require variables to be strongly typed, they certainly could be. I typically did because that's what I was used to in the Java world.

Interesting, sounds like Groovy is optionally typed like Dart is. Sounds like a great language for frontend development.

Have you tried Swift 3? It also has elegant syntax. 1st time I'm hearing about Kotlin... What is it used for and why was it invented? How easy is it to get started and build 1st business production app without installing over 9000 packages or VMs? Java sucks, it's true.

Kotlin has everything Swift has plus some more as well as the awesome ecosystem that comes with working on the JVM whereas Swift has some catching up to do if you want to use it server-side. Await Async is coming soon under Co-routines, so for now that's one thing Swift has that Kotlin doesn't yet have.

Kotlin is using Type Inference whereas Swift is a little more flexible in this regard.

Kotlin can be used everywhere where Java is being used, so Android, Serverside, compiled to JS, etc. The Java ecosystem is still an awesome ecosystem, the language itself is just showing its age, this is where Kotlin comes to the rescue.

How complicated you want to go is up to you, use Maven, Gradle, Ant, straight Kotlin compiler, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc. Here's a simple hello world example that gets compiled to JavaScript: try.kotlinlang.org

Finally! Kudos for the effort and time to compile this HNO.

I'm currently looking into Kotlin and my plan to ditch Java is getting delayed. But with more and more I read about Kotlin, I grow more and more into it. As I mentioned before, it wouldn't be long before I left Java for Kotlin, and thanks for putting out all information which I needed.

The most interesting thing is, how quick I can write the same code in Kotlin with far more less code. And this is what I was looking for. Another good thing is, it is coming under JVM family IIRC!

Once again, thank you for writing this, so that people like me, who thought Java was the end of the world can get more idea about this Insane language!

I prefer to go full on. I used to work on Groovy+Spring, and man, that was a total mess. The code base was pretty good, but managing it was a big PITA. It's not my cup of coffee, and I prefer to go with either Kotlin or Java. Combining both, my OCD will kill me!

Kotlin + Spring is also doable, you just have to lateinit your @Autowired dependencies, or autowire them via the constructor, although I've abandoned Spring as well rather going for VertX as a replacement for SpringMVC and when I really need dependency injection, which is almost never, I use Guice. Kodein and Dagger seems like good options as well which I haven't had time to investigate yet.

That sounds great but I don't think I will move away from Spring anytime soon!

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Why I abandoned Java in favour of Kotlin

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