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Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

blog.jetbrains.com

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Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#11

Post by lmm »

merb wrote: post #5

actually I'm still unsure about kotlin. some things are really great some things are not. I mean i will still use kotlin, especially for libraries since it is great for that. however somehow I still missed something on top of Executors and CompletionStage. And I'm totally unhappy about "So, why doesn’t Kotlin have its own package manager, or its own build system? Because there’s already Maven and Gradle, and re-using…

Maven is fantastic in my book. Literally the best build system I've seen. But even if you disagree with me on the specifics, if there's something you want to change about one of those tools, surely you'd want to make the same change when building Java? I don't see any value in rewriting one of those tools in Kotlin to make it Kotlin. (And if some particular idea is easier to express in Kotlin, I've written Maven plugins in Scala, I'm sure you could do it in Kotlin too)

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#12

Post by merb »

lmm wrote: post #11
merb wrote: post #5

actually I'm still unsure about kotlin. some things are really great some things are not. I mean i will still use kotlin, especially for libraries since it is great for that. however somehow I still missed something on top of Executors and CompletionStage. And I'm totally unhappy about "So, why doesn’t Kotlin have its own package manager, or its own build system? Because there’s already Maven and Gradle, and re-using…

Maven is fantastic in my book. Literally the best build system I've seen. But even if you disagree with me on the specifics, if there's something you want to change about one of those tools, surely you'd want to make the same change when building Java? I don't see any value in rewriting one of those tools in Kotlin to make it Kotlin. (And if some particular idea is easier to express in Kotlin, I've written Maven plug…

currently I use sbt and as said they are okai to work with, but they are not great, else there would've been only one. ;) Actually I like many things on sbt, but It has some clear downsides and it's not hard to figure them out. Actually I would favor gradle from all of them however I started with sbt and I think I actually will stick with it a while, even if there are some downsides.

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#13

Post by lmm »

Nutomic wrote: post #7
merb wrote: post #5

actually I'm still unsure about kotlin. some things are really great some things are not. I mean i will still use kotlin, especially for libraries since it is great for that. however somehow I still missed something on top of Executors and CompletionStage. And I'm totally unhappy about "So, why doesn’t Kotlin have its own package manager, or its own build system? Because there’s already Maven and Gradle, and re-using…

Can you name any criticism of Gradle? I've used it for years now (for Android development). It's steadily being improved, and is really good in my opinion.

There's no clear separation between build config and random Groovy expressions. There's not even a spec for what a .gradle file looks like. That's fine for "get this done quickly", but ultimately it encourages people to put one-off hacks in the build file that become a maintainability nightmare.

(And because its "config" files are arbitrary turing-complete code, its IDE integration is never going to be as good as Maven's)

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#14

Post by lmm »

merb wrote: post #12
lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maven is fantastic in my book. Literally the best build system I've seen. But even if you disagree with me on the specifics, if there's something you want to change about one of those tools, surely you'd want to make the same change when building Java? I don't see any value in rewriting one of those tools in Kotlin to make it Kotlin. (And if some particular idea is easier to express in Kotlin, I've written Maven plug…

currently I use sbt and as said they are okai to work with, but they are not great, else there would've been only one. ;) Actually I like many things on sbt, but It has some clear downsides and it's not hard to figure them out. Actually I would favor gradle from all of them however I started with sbt and I think I actually will stick with it a while, even if there are some downsides.

That's a very unconstructive post. Please be more specific about upsides and downsides rather than just saying "It has some clear downsides and it's not hard to figure them out".

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#15

Post by pswenson »

lmm wrote: post #11
merb wrote: post #5

actually I'm still unsure about kotlin. some things are really great some things are not. I mean i will still use kotlin, especially for libraries since it is great for that. however somehow I still missed something on top of Executors and CompletionStage. And I'm totally unhappy about "So, why doesn’t Kotlin have its own package manager, or its own build system? Because there’s already Maven and Gradle, and re-using…

Maven is fantastic in my book. Literally the best build system I've seen. But even if you disagree with me on the specifics, if there's something you want to change about one of those tools, surely you'd want to make the same change when building Java? I don't see any value in rewriting one of those tools in Kotlin to make it Kotlin. (And if some particular idea is easier to express in Kotlin, I've written Maven plug…

how do you do conditionals or loops in maven?

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#16

Post by pswenson »

merb wrote: post #5

actually I'm still unsure about kotlin. some things are really great some things are not. I mean i will still use kotlin, especially for libraries since it is great for that. however somehow I still missed something on top of Executors and CompletionStage. And I'm totally unhappy about "So, why doesn’t Kotlin have its own package manager, or its own build system? Because there’s already Maven and Gradle, and re-using…

there is a kotlin build system

http://beust.com/kobalt/home/index.html

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#17

Post by merb »

lmm wrote: post #14
merb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

currently I use sbt and as said they are okai to work with, but they are not great, else there would've been only one. ;) Actually I like many things on sbt, but It has some clear downsides and it's not hard to figure them out. Actually I would favor gradle from all of them however I started with sbt and I think I actually will stick with it a while, even if there are some downsides.

That's a very unconstructive post. Please be more specific about upsides and downsides rather than just saying "It has some clear downsides and it's not hard to figure them out".

sbt downsides:

    - slow resolution (could be really really really slow)
    - transitive dependencies could be a mess since it could actually will mostly give you a evicition but it's hard to actually resolve that.
    - however if you have two plugins a evicition is not printed, so you will actually get a funny stack trace if you actually use a library that resolve something via reflections. (i.e. closure compiler)
    - sbt is slow
    - sbt has some wierd operators.
    - has problem with dynamic ranged versions
    - scoped settings are cool, but could be wierd to understand, especially for new people
    - sbt-web which tries to use npm which it packages as webjars which actually is a total mess since you actually run into the great world of npm packaging and try to force it into a completly different format.
there are more, however these are the ones I often deal with

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#18

Post by pswenson »

lmm wrote: post #13
Nutomic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name any criticism of Gradle? I've used it for years now (for Android development). It's steadily being improved, and is really good in my opinion.

There's no clear separation between build config and random Groovy expressions. There's not even a spec for what a .gradle file looks like. That's fine for "get this done quickly", but ultimately it encourages people to put one-off hacks in the build file that become a maintainability nightmare. (And because its "config" files are arbitrary turing-complete code, its IDE integration is never going to be as good as Mav…

So I think gradle has a lot of problems, but having access to Groovy anywhere is a good thing. You can always make your builds do what you want.

And as in all things if your code gets too complicated you need to refactor, extract logic into methods/classes, etc.

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#19

Post by norswap »

I've been using Kotlin for work (I'm a PhD student, so work is to be understood in a peculiar fashion) and I'm really liking it.

It's a much needed upgrade to Java whose fundamental advantage is what I'd call "crispness": you can write terse code that is actually understandable. In particular, the notion of inlining closures allows for efficient functional programming and great DSLs.

In comparison to Scala, Kotlin is much less advanced, but much much simpler. Like said earlier, it's easily as terse as Scala. Scala, however, is much more expressive (what I'd give for typeclasses...) and that sometimes hurts in Kotlin as it does in Java.

There's also Ceylon (JVM language by Red Hat) who is seemingly in the same niche and which I very much wants to experiment with. From what I've read so far, Ceylon seems conceptually more elegant and more powerful than Kotlin. The open question is whether it can match Kotlin's crispness.

It feels a bit early for a release however. The compiler is still completely wonky. Inference sometimes fails on things that should be completely trivial. It is particularly bad at taking return types into account. It's fully usable, but expect to work your way about some linguistic unpleasantness (or outright bugs).

Also, for some reason, Kotlin seems big in Japan.

Re: Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android

#20

Post by winterbe »

Kotlin is currently my favorite alternative JVM language. Kudos to all collaborators for the great work. After 5 years of hard work, you finally made it!

Here's a little starter project for Kotlin webapps using Spring Boot and React.js, I made a while ago:

https://github.com/winterbe/spring-kotlin-react-demo

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