Kotlin 1.0.5 is here • Hacker News Board

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#101

Post by sdegutis » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:27 AM UTC

optionalparens wrote: post #90

sdegutis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Thanks for all this. I've casually read a lot of people's advice on game dev, and while some of it is reflected in what you said, your comment kind of ties it all together. And it confirms something I've been thinking for a few months (possibly years)... Everything needed to write a simple game is right there in C, using structs, pointers, and functions! Anything beyond that is over-engineering. And the convenie…

What you are saying is mostly right, perhaps somewhat of an oversimplification. Interestingly, these days I work with quite a bit of Clojure. Most of what I've been describing came about because people were in OOP hell, and decided to move towards composition vs. inheritance. As multi-core machines, GPUs, and more sophisticated games arose as well, there was more of a need to start thinking more in terms of what the…

Thanks for the advice. Best of luck, especially if you're dealing with burnout which it sounds like you might be from your other comments. I'll definitely be taking your advice and trying something in SDL. Maybe a simple SNES Mario-like clone for starters [1]. Man, it's been 10 years since I last tried that, and back then it was in Freebasic! What a wild ride. Okay I think I'm too tired to adequately form a comment properly. Stayed up too late for this election and the speed. Man, what a wild ride! Well anyway good night and thanks again.

[1] : https://github.com/sdegutis/mario-sdl2

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#102

Post by mhd » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:36 AM UTC

runT1ME wrote: post #33

gregschlom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After having so much fun with Kotlin, I tried switching to Scala and quickly switched back. Scala seems too complicated, with a steep learning curve. Implicits all over the place made it hard to read code and understand what was going on. I do like many of the more powerful features that Scala has, but Kotlin strikes a right balance of simplicity and power in my opinion.

As a really big Scala fan, I can say Kotlin is probably the right choice when it comes to doing Android development. That being said, yes Scala has a steeper learning curve than say, Kotlin or Go. But if you're going to devote the I don't know, next ten years of your life to working in a particular language, does it really matter if it takes two months vs. four months to ramp up?

In the mobile space, I see a lot of "also ran" languages, never mind the platform. I don't think people who wrote iOS apps were much intent on using Objective-C outside of that, and I don't think Swift will improve much on this. A lot of Android developers fall into the same niche: They're using Java because they have to, not because it's their major background. So anything that makes their side errands into Android-land easier is welcome (cf. react-native).

Plenty of "ok-ish, but not too hard to learn" languages proliferate in that kind of climate, like go for small web services (where Erlang was too much of an investment). The Unix approach of 1001 ad hoc sub-languages (awk, pic, ed...) adapted.

Quite different from e.g. a J2EE developer's approach, who tends to think of career-defining technologies and languages, where Scala seems like a wise investment.

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#103

Post by V-2 » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #100

V-2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's kind of the point. Kotlin is supposed to be light weight and easy. Besides, using Scala for Android, while possible, is cumbersome. Kotlin wins this one hands down.

Scala for Android is fine. The only thing that makes it harder than Kotlin is JetBrains disingenuously shipping their Kotlin plugin but not their (more popular) Scala plugin by default, which they could fix tomorrow if they wanted to.

Last I checked, Kotlin plugin isn't installed (in Android Studio) by default. Are you referring to IntelliJ Idea?

I tried to use Scala for Android in the past and I gave up after attempting to set it up for a few hours. Admittedly it was a while back, perhaps things have improved.

Your claim that Scala on Android works fine got me interested again, so I googled around, found that blog post from May this year (that's more recent than my own experiments), and apparently there are still hurdles: http://blog.scalac.io/2016/05/19/reflections-on-starting-and...

With this type of issues the thing that I'm wary about is not getting a "hello world" app to compile once, but that I can get a project up and running, then need to add something else to the equation (say, a DI, or some code processor), and things fall apart again in an X-Files fashion.

I've heard that Scala has long build times, too, but maybe it's a thing of the past as well - no first-hand experience here as I never got to that stage.

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#104

Post by mike_hearn » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:51 AM UTC

willtim wrote: post #54

mike_hearn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unclean about for loops?

For loops require explicit and error-prone use of integer indices and are of limited utility outside arrays. Foreach loops in Java/C# are an attempt to generalise, but they are really just syntactic sugar over external iterators. They give privileged status to the specific iteration interface chosen, entangling the language and its libraries. The actual Iterator interface chosen by Java has proven to be unsuitable fo…

Yeah, I was meaning 'for loops' to include the modern sense of foreach loops too. Java doesn't distinguish and Kotlin doesn't have the old style at all.

There's no rule that says a for loop must only support a single iteration interface. That seems more like an implementation detail of the compiler than a problem with for loops in general.

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#105

Post by V-2 » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:52 AM UTC

voddan wrote: post #99

V-2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like both, but why do you consider Kotlin better than C#? I also don't get your point about how lame Xamarin apps look. Xamarin apps use native layout components (could be wrapped with lowest common denominator abstractions in case of Xamarin.Forms, but it's optional), so they're 100% capable of looking the same way your native app would.

iOS and Android UX guides have completely different approaches to the logic of user interaction. AFAIK, Xamarin does not allow to have different layouts generated from shared code. So, even that components are native, their placement is alien.

> Xamarin does not allow to have different layouts generated from shared code

That's true, but noone says or recommends that all the code is shared. Typical Xamarin architecture and good practice assumes sharing the business (or domain) layer, and coding the views separately. In terms of reusability it's still superior in comparison to writing both versions natively. Obviously the level of reuse you can achieve that way very much depends on the nature of the application.

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#106

Post by cryptos » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

dxxvi wrote: post #18

Is there anybody switching from Scala to Kotlin?

I've used both, Scala and Kotlin, and I like Kotlin very much.

A programming with more features is not necessarily better. The limited features of Kotlin (compared to Scala) are an advantage, if you change your point of view. Some advantages:

  * easier to learn (a Java dev will be more productive than in Java in a day or two)
  * easier to maintain since Kotlin doesn't allow so much hard to understand code constructs
  * fewer discussions about the one true style or way to do something
  * it's easier to build good tooling
  * much faster compilation
  * smoother Java interop
  * performance implications are more predictable

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#107

Post by simono » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #103

lmm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala for Android is fine. The only thing that makes it harder than Kotlin is JetBrains disingenuously shipping their Kotlin plugin but not their (more popular) Scala plugin by default, which they could fix tomorrow if they wanted to.

Last I checked, Kotlin plugin isn't installed (in Android Studio) by default. Are you referring to IntelliJ Idea? I tried to use Scala for Android in the past and I gave up after attempting to set it up for a few hours. Admittedly it was a while back, perhaps things have improved. Your claim that Scala on Android works fine got me interested again, so I googled around, found that blog post from May this year (that's…

The article isn't very good, even the link to the 'official' page is outdated.

Just use sbt-android and skip all the other nonsense.

Compilation is impressively fast, as the plugin uses the information from incremental compilation to skip ProGuarding completely for things that haven't changed.

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#108

Post by willtim » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #104

willtim wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For loops require explicit and error-prone use of integer indices and are of limited utility outside arrays. Foreach loops in Java/C# are an attempt to generalise, but they are really just syntactic sugar over external iterators. They give privileged status to the specific iteration interface chosen, entangling the language and its libraries. The actual Iterator interface chosen by Java has proven to be unsuitable fo…

Yeah, I was meaning 'for loops' to include the modern sense of foreach loops too. Java doesn't distinguish and Kotlin doesn't have the old style at all. There's no rule that says a for loop must only support a single iteration interface. That seems more like an implementation detail of the compiler than a problem with for loops in general.

Of course the big elephant in the room that I didn't mention, is that for loops get work done via mutation. This is perhaps what was mean't by “unclean".

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#109

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #76

nostrademons wrote: post #7

Saw this pop up in my IDE this morning, excited to upgrade. The auto-for-loop-refactoring is interesting. I've found I never use for-loops in Kotlin - between the abundance of iterator methods and concise trailing-closure syntax, it always ends up being more concisely expressed as collection.forEach { ...body... }. Seems like the language may be going that way too; I wonder if we'll eventually see the for-loop start…

But does .forEach compile to an efficient for-loop in Kotlin?

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

#110

Post by simono » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #91

simono wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which issues did you experience?

Kotlin: 1 - Install plugin into Android Studio 2 - Configure the Gradle plugin Enjoy Android development within Studio. Scala: Follow this several pages long tutorial: https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2016/10/setting-up-scala-on-andr... Try to enjoy while working around issues with Studio integration and common Android libraries.

I wonder how people come up with these pointless, overcomplicated tutorials...