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Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

learnxinyminutes.com

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Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#131

Post by vbezhenar »

shallot_router wrote: post #11
notamy wrote: post #10

Honestly I could never really get into Kotlin. I like the features of the language - and would love to have many of them in plain ol' Java - but the syntax just feels wrong to me and I've not been able to get over it.

I find it a huge improvement over Java, but I wish it would have more syntax sugar for lists/arrays/maps like Swift and dynamic languages do. The mix of "hip" programming language constructs with unchanged Java verbosity feels weird to me. But if I were making an Android app, I'd definitely try to do it with Kotlin first.

AFAIK literals for lists/maps are on their TODO list.

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#132

Post by Lerc »

I like this

    val z = (1..9).map {it * 3}
                  .filter {it
I'd like it more if it said it performed the functions in parallel. If it does this Automagically I'm sold. If it doesn't, is there an easy to use form that does do batch operations like map in parallel?

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#133

Post by lghh »

jorgemf wrote: post #121
ajmurmann wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk was that you might end up with a code base that you cannot find developers that will work on it/maintain it in the future. The Android support should pretty much guarantee that there will be enough developers familiar with it in the future.

If you are an Android developer you should be aware of kotlin long time and and also tried and use it. Good Android developer knew kotlin before, now you will face more noise to find them. It is like hiring something who doesn't know the most used libraries in Android. And the risk is exactly the same. The language is not difficult to learn, not much more than a mid-complex library.

But Kotlin was farrrrrrrrrr from a "most used library". The risk of an unsupported language being used is much, much greater than using an unsupported library. Libraries are non-trivial to remove from your code, but should not be tied to your code to the point that you will be required to completely rewrite your application like you would if you ran into issues with the language it's written in.

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#135

Post by guelo »

Lerc wrote: post #132

I like this val z = (1..9).map {it * 3} .filter {it I'd like it more if it said it performed the functions in parallel. If it does this Automagically I'm sold. If it doesn't, is there an easy to use form that does do batch operations like map in parallel?

No, not parallel. Though it should be possible to add extension functions to Collection that use Java 8's Stream apis to provide that functionality.

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#136

Post by jorgemf »

lghh wrote: post #133
jorgemf wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an Android developer you should be aware of kotlin long time and and also tried and use it. Good Android developer knew kotlin before, now you will face more noise to find them. It is like hiring something who doesn't know the most used libraries in Android. And the risk is exactly the same. The language is not difficult to learn, not much more than a mid-complex library.

But Kotlin was farrrrrrrrrr from a "most used library". The risk of an unsupported language being used is much, much greater than using an unsupported library. Libraries are non-trivial to remove from your code, but should not be tied to your code to the point that you will be required to completely rewrite your application like you would if you ran into issues with the language it's written in.

Say so to the people who is using RxJava or similar, whether they need to rewrite everything or not. In every program you need to take architectural decisions that affect how everything is build and a change on them could mean to rewrite everything. It can be a library or the programming language.

JetBrains was supporting kotlin for Android, the same people that build IntelliJ idea (the base of Android Studio). But who is supporting RxJava? Imagine that the react community wants to make a move that will harm Android devs, so they change all the Rx*, including RxJava.

Using kotlin wasn't a risk. Google said it will make it first class citizen, but do you really trust Google in the long term? They close products very quickly. I feel safer knowing that JetBrains is behind kotlin and not Google.

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#137

Post by jackmott »

coldpizza wrote: post #28

> Declaring values is done using either "var" or "val". "val" declarations cannot be reassigned, whereas "vars" can. I wonder why they decided on these very mistakable names. Why not const/constant/cons/whatever else just as long it's distinguishable from each other?

value as being immutable is a common idiom

Re: Learn Kotlin in Y Minutes

#138

Post by jorgemf »

smitherfield wrote: post #129
TJ-14 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new developer I'd like to hear more about why this is?

If a language or tool is officially supported, then that means the project maintainers (Google, in this case) promise to support its use with official documentation, priority bug fixes (for example, if an Android update breaks your app which is written in Kotlin and uses only public, non-deprecated APIs, Google will consider it just as high-priority a bug as if it were written in Java), and first-class access to new…

JetBrains is doing this, not Google. Google is only going to collaborate with JetBrains to help with the Android support.

> Android update breaks your app which is written in Kotlin

then it also breaks the same app written in java. Because the good thing about kotlin is that it is transparent, it generates bytecode as java does. So from the point of view of the platform there is no difference between kotlin and java.

> first-class access to new APIs as soon as they're created.

This makes me think you don't know how kotlin works. You can mix java and kotlin files in the same app and call methods from one to the other without problems.

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