141–150 of 203 posts
Another language you may want to look at is Ceylon from RedHat, which has some interesting features (union and intersection types, notably)
Everyone and their cousin can create a language, but without tooling then one is back to authoring in "dumb" editors and I will never ever tolerate that on a team again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI, pron's the author of a would be competing project to Scala's Akka (i.e. competing for share of distributed computing market on the JVM), and takes every opportunity to danger-danger-dragons-be-there on Scala related threads/comments. Saying that, there is always some truth in what pron brings to the table, it's sort of a higher kinded trolling ;-) As for Scala and PL concepts, sure, plenty on offer if that's of…
FYI, I had taken "every opportunity to danger-danger-dragons-be-there" Scala — on record — years before I even dreamed of the database company that would one day have an open-source project which would end up competing with Akka (I'm talking 2009/10, while Quasar was first conceived in mid 2013). It was after leading an attempt to adopt Scala at a large organization, which failed because of what I saw as Scala's bait…
Seriously though, I doubt Kotlin would ever be the first choice for a project like Spark since Scala excels in the DSL department (really without rival on the JVM, and off, only Haskell comes close). Look through Spark source code [1] and you'll see: operator overloading, (sealed) ADTs, exhaustive pattern matching, etc. functionality that you can't even think the thought in in a language like Kotlin. This has nothing to do with monad transformers and other FPisms, just straight DSL power.
Finally, to put things in perspective in terms of the mindhsare that Scala and its ecosystem are drawing, IBM is investing over 100 million dollars per year in Spark research and development [2]. Sorry, but that's absolutely massive, maybe there are no dragons? Or if there are, the big players don't seem overly bothered.
[1] https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/sql/catalyst/src...
[2] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47107.wss
But Scala is much, much more powerful than Kotlin. Just look at Scala Traits for example. I think, if you have good developers who are willing to learn and to improve, you can get more out of Scala. If you're not that lucky (and I think that is the usual case), you maybe better off with Kotlin.
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It's worked out pretty well for them I'd say. Consider that any developer can write a plugin for it easily, that cannot segfault the entire app, and which runs on all the platforms the IDE supports. That's just one advantage. Higher productivity of feature development is probably another. To see how things could have been different, look at Visual Studio which is still a 32 bit program even in 2015. Users of it compl…
> Higher productivity of feature development is probably another. So productive that they had to invent a new language for the JVM platform?
Well, let's look at the JVM landscape. First of all Oracle has (finally) picked up the pace in terms of evolving Java and the JVM. This is a bit of a double edged sword for alternative JVM languages since on the one hand JVM improvements (like current SAMs and value types in Java 10) are a big win for all involved, but on the other, Java's evolution is very much a threat to Scala, Kotlin, and Ceylon in particular* Wh…
I doubt it. Java 10 is very, very unlikely to match even a fraction of the features Kotlin has. Oracle is very obviously continuing Sun's strategy of focusing on the JVM rather than the Java language. Their roadmap is pretty clear for the coming years, and it's all things like value types, better arrays, better APIs, modularity, performance, better ways to do "unsafe" stuff, etc. The only major change to the Java lan…
Absolutely. Oracle's strategy is very simple: Java should serve as the assembly language for the server side. The JVM should be the de-facto runtime. Like pron suggests, they are actively encouraging alternative JVM languages and I wouldn't be surprised if they invest in the JRuby/Jython implementations for quicker adoption.
As someone watching from the side, Oracle's strategy is brilliant.
I'm currently writing a book about Kotlin for Android Developers: https://leanpub.com/kotlin-for-android-developers Overall I think it is a really interesting language for Android (and I guess Java) developers. It's much cleaner and safer. I recommend at least taking some time to play with it and see how it looks. I also have some simple articles at my blog, antonioleiva.com, very basic and perfect to start with it.
I've been using Kotlin on-and-off as a Java replacement and I've really enjoyed it. A couple of months ago I used Kotlin to setup a Dropwizard project and it was a breeze so I put together an example on GitHub to serve as a starting point for others: https://github.com/doomspork/kotlin-dropwizard
Yes, I've used kotlin to replace a large legacy Java application. Pretty critical to the business, sat in the middle interacting with. All upstream and downstream systems. Kotlin certain ly made life easier in some places, most importantly it was fast and easy and a joy to work with.
> I worry about its long term viability given it's low presence on GitHub[1] and It's only on version 0.12.213. Bit premature to judge long term viability imho.
The minor version represents a milestone, currently at 12 and each of these is considerable effort, in terms of decisions and implementation of language features (as well as tooling).
I had never heard of Kotlin but after looking at the docs I am very impressed. I spend most of my time in the web development world (PHP, Javascript) but I am thinking about starting a small Android project. I have zero Java knowledge so I wonder if it is feasible to jump straight into using Kotlin or to try and learn some Java first?