Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
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Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#2I feel good and bad about this.
I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management.
Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... )
And I think Kotlin is a solid step forward from the Java without the baggage of pre JDK 1.7 idioms.
But for a small (often single dev) shops trying to compete in Android marketspace, it is quite hard to maintain this rate of change (plus incorporating all the new (and better ways) of doing android with androidx )
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#3Not sure why they don't link to a source on this. Here's what I found [0]. It says:
> If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin
[0] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/google-io-...
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#4I feel good and bad about this. I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management. Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... ) And…
Not sure what you mean by templates, but you can still use Rx, streams and java.time.* in Kotlin. It's pretty much just a nicer Java.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#5I feel good and bad about this. I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management. Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... ) And…
I’ve seen that article you linked to before. Is the solution to working around Oracle not OpenJDK? I’m not completely informed on the topic. Would appreciate some more context.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#6I feel good and bad about this. I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management. Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... ) And…
I’ve seen that article you linked to before. Is the solution to working around Oracle not OpenJDK? I’m not completely informed on the topic. Would appreciate some more context.
Usually FUD against Oracle, that always ignores that Oracle is also the major company behind OpenJDK.
Until there are other companies actually implementing JEPs into OpenJDK in the same volume as Oracle, OpenJDK == Oracle.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#7Good that they cleared that out.
Lets see what is the roadmap to use Java 9+ libraries in Android, or if they are supposed to be all rewritten in Kotlin.
Secondly, will they also replace NDK with Kotlin/Native? Given that several APIs are NDK only, and naturally should be accessible to the prefered language as well, without manual boilerplate.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#8I feel good and bad about this. I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management. Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... ) And…
If Oracle was really intent on poisoning Java then they would've stopped investing in it and fired all of the core engineers.
But they didn't. And have in fact continued to invest in the ecosystem e.g. GraalVM, OpenJDK.
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#9...great, Kotlin for Android, Dart for Flutter, on the ML side they're starting to adopt Swift, for networking infra code Go.
What the heck is with this "tower of babel"?!
Are other people not bothered by the overlapping features of all these languages? At this point I thin most would prefer a slightly-frankensteinian monster-language that you'd get by taking either Kotlin or Swift and bolting all the other features on top of it.
There should be an estimate about the cost of all this useless diversity that we're all invisibly paying. Some tech/languages have really unique features, and have a reason/right to exist, eg. Rust. But most would've been better as extra features bolted on top another language.
Basically all programming in the world could be done with 3 languages: a secure system language (Rust?), a dynamic but optionally typed dynamic one (Typescript?), a full-spectrum metal-to-abstraction language with flexible compiler/infra for things like heterogeneous (CPU+GPU+TPU+whatever) code generation (C++? D? Swift? Julia? maybe also Rust?).
Plus the hidden cost of security issues created by people coding in languages they are not experts in because they need to always switch...
Re: Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development
#10I feel good and bad about this. I invested several years at coming up to speed with Java 8+ (using templates, rx, streams, the new time APIs). It was not hard, but difficult to unlearn some C++ idioms around templates, consts, reference model and object lifecycle management. Clearly this driven by Oracle's continuous poisoning of Java ecosystem (eg https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f... ) And…
Not sure what you mean by templates, but you can still use Rx, streams and java.time.* in Kotlin. It's pretty much just a nicer Java.
Kotlin has its own (much better IMO) alternative to streams: Sequence. I see absolutely no reason to use streams in Kotlin.