91–100 of 236 posts
Regarding Google sponsoring every language, it's a well-known practice that Wall Street banks are the main donnors of both Democrats and Republicans. No better way to eliminate competing platforms than buying them up.
oops...
They're also co-founders of the Rust Foundation[1], the major member of the select group of companies at the table at WHATWG[2] (which amongst other things decide on the future of web technologies, including JavaScript) due to their browser's market share, and a "visionary sponsor" of the Python Foundation[3].
They also develop a few programming languages themselves, like Go and Dart (not to mention their polemic Java implementation), besides their own OS (Android, Fuchsia).
A company as large as Google is kind of expected to be using every technology in existence, but I still find it interesting how they're also making sure they also play a major role in the evoluation of such technologies by being part of any Foundation that might have any relevance whatsoever (if not via their own languages, at least by exerting influence on everything).
[1] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl...
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Kotlin never appealed to backend developers (based on job ads, new open-source projects in the domain). Data pipelines, concurrency and streaming are becoming more and more part of what a backend dev should know. Instead, I've noticed that Scala is used in many systems where Java historically was less ergonomic for the task. Spark, Delta, Deequ, Scio, Finagle, Flink, Kafka, the Typelevel & ZIO ecosystems, Akka are so…
I think a big part of the appeal of Kotlin was that Scala was impractical for use on Android so Kotlin slid in as "the missing pieces" of Java.
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But... When Java gets "properly engineered solution" for async code... Kotlin got it as well!
Not at all, because Kotlin wants to take it all, so they need to make the choice if they want to expose JVM features, or keep the language portable across all platforms that JetBrains wants to target with Kotlin. A good example is Kotlin/Native, by choosing a memory model incompatible with JVM code they failed, and were forced to go back into the drawing board for Kotlin/Native with a proper tracing GC.
A question for HN - I like Java a lot for the ‘http API talking to SQL database’ usecase, with my goto for that being dropwizard or spring boot. I’ve only ever looked at Kotlin code in blogposts, haven’t ever actually used it. I’m probably at least a few years behind on its feature set, but I am aware of all the great features Java has added in that timeframe, many no doubt inspired by Kotlin! Would you advise me to…
I've been writing Kotlin professionally for the past 2 years. I'd highly recommend it as a worthy successor to Java. It's very powerful and thoughtfully designed. Java just feels so old and clunky after using it. I've not had the pleasure but I hear Scala is great too.
I’ve used Kotlin on Server Side in production at a pretty significant scale and I think it’s the most underrated thing for people using JVM on servers. I recently had a podcast with one of Spring dev advocates (Josh Long) https://spring.io/blog/2021/02/11/a-bootiful-podcast-doordas... (shameless plug) and brought similar discussion to table. I will seriously urge folks to try it and hopefully foundation will bring mo…
Looking to give Kotlin another shot for non-Android API consumption and it seems like Ktor is a frontrunner. Looking at Spring WebClient to consume a JSON API makes my eyes hurt compared to other languages.
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> How did Java (as opposed to JVM) Well that’s the point - they solved it in the JVM not as a kludge of bytecode.
Well, once that happened Kotlin also gets the solution. It's rude and unfair to call out a language as "solving the problems with kludges" when they literally could not have done anything better.
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I work in a fintech company, most of our backend is in Kotlin with "legacy" functionality in Java. Can't think of a single developer that would choose Java over Kotlin.
Here is one, outside Android, Kotlin is other guest language that will fail to take Java 's place on the Java Virtual Machine.
I do think kotlin isnt only aiming to the Java Virtual Machine, it is mucho more.
Kotlin is a much better Java, and these days if I need to use the JVM, I will use Kotlin.
However, I do feel that there is a huge missed opportunity in making something that is not just a better Java, but a better language. Kotlin has a lot of annoying limitations, almost all of which are there because the JVM doesn't allow better implementations using first-class JVM functionality.
One of my favourite examples is multimethods which would be an amazing improvement. However, the JVM can't do dynamic dispatch on multiple arguments, so Kotlin will never get it. Sure, if they implement it, calling Kotlin from Java would be more complicated, but that really shouldn't restrict how the language evolves.
Another thing I'd like to see changed is better support for DSL's. Some nice stuff has been done with the limited facilities that are available, but it always seems like I'm fighting the language when making DSL's. As someone who writes a lot of Lisp, I'd really like to see a macro system.
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Here is one, outside Android, Kotlin is other guest language that will fail to take Java 's place on the Java Virtual Machine.
Why do you say so? I do think kotlin isnt only aiming to the Java Virtual Machine, it is mucho more.
On the contrary, platform languages slowly acquire the relevant features of the shiny languages, which eventually either fade away or find a niche for survival.
Kotlin will be relevant as long as Android exists, that is all.