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Kotlin Is Better

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

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Re: Kotlin Is Better

#141

Post by xiaoma »

kasey_junk wrote: post #134
andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Is there reason to choose Kotlin if you don't already live in the Java world? Put another way, is it a language that makes living in the Java environment less painful, and thus only of value to people who continue to need to live in the Java world? Why would someone who has never programmed in the Java ecosystem use Kotlin? I'm surely ignorant and prejudiced but when I read this I thought "Hey why not try Kotlin?", t…

For certain classes of problems the JVM just cannot be beat. Its a phenomenal bit of tech that laps the competition, especially with regard to large data sets, concurrency support, and instrumentation. Unfortunately, Java the language is fairly painful to work in (less so every release but still). Kotlin makes that particular problem less of an issue. Even in plain Java though, your description of "the vast, lumberin…

Could you dig in a bit more into how the JVM laps the Erlang VM in terms of concurrency support and instrumentation?

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#142

Post by [deleted] »

mpweiher wrote: post #109
watwut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic refactoring in dynamic languages are nowhere need to those in java. Just rename method - with static typing you know it was changed correctly everywhere, full stop. Implementation of refactoring code is easy. With javascript, you just don't know what can potentially come in as argument of function, so you don't know whether object function call can or can not be renamed. Smalltalk authors seeing static typi…

Please: re-read the comment and preferably the links as well. Once again: automatic refactoring tools were invented on Smalltalk. > Smalltalk authors seeing static typing as major potential problem Authors saw lack of static typing as a major potential problem. It just wasn't. Again: reading helps. A lot.

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#143

Post by skrowl »

bpicolo wrote: post #20

I've started to come around on a similar thought recently, after a few years avoiding static typing in python. I've been toying with C# specifically. C# with visual studio is, I think, the most productive environment I've come across in programming. It's ergonomically sound, straightforward, and the IDE protects me from all sorts of relevant errors. Steve mentioned Intellij is a bit slower than he'd hope typing somet…

If you know C# you don't really need Kotlin. You can write windows, windows universal, web, linux console, Android and iOS apps, all native, and all in C#.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#144

Post by annnnd »

nemothekid wrote: post #15

> And Android has some pretty big red-light APIs. Fragments, for example, are a well-known Flagship Bad API in Android. Ugh. I left Android development right around Honeycomb - where Fragments were supposed to be the cool way to manage your app and you'd get screen orientation and device screen configuration all for almost free. In practice I found Fragments far more confusing to use than the already complex Activity…

Interesting - I thought it was just me. I couldn't comprehend the way they are supposed to work until I spent lots of time figuring it out. And then I had a year off Adndroid and when I came back I couldn't make sense of my own code... awful interface. I have no idea why they didn't replace it with some better concept.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#145

Post by noir_lord »

barrkel wrote: post #19

Other language built around IDE support: Delphi. The compiler was built with callbacks to provide code completion; it runs in process, as a DLL, as part of the IDE. No accident that Hejlsberg also design C#, and innovated further with TypeScript's language server. He wrote the original Turbo Pascal (IDE + Compiler in the same executable) in assembler, so he's been building IDE + language combos all his life.

My all time favourite languages are (in descending order), Delphi, Turbo Pascal and C#.

It's not a co-incidence that I moved to TypeScript recently and am absolutely loving it, it feels like JS but engineered.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#146

Post by icedchai »

pkolaczk wrote: post #107
runT1ME wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a large Scala team. We use microservices so my regular compile times are somewhere between 4s and 20s. I rarely have to do a full rebuild. IDE support is bad, that's a good criticism but a good chunk of us don't use IDEs, and instead write it like a dynamic language. Live inside the REPL, copy paste back and fourth. As for 'subsets' everyone uses, I find this advantageous. Our team strongly encourages a pur…

Scala IDE support is bad? What IDE are you using? I find IDE support in IDEA almost on par with that of Java. It is very fast, has accurate error highlighting, very good smart autocomplete, understands advanced Scala features, supports most refactoring I care of, but most importantly works reliably.

This was back in 2010-2011, so I am sure it has improved 6 years later.

Back then, most of the team was using Eclipse, which was awful! IntelliJ's support was better, even then... but still sluggish.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#147

Post by _ivvf »

bpicolo wrote: post #20

I've started to come around on a similar thought recently, after a few years avoiding static typing in python. I've been toying with C# specifically. C# with visual studio is, I think, the most productive environment I've come across in programming. It's ergonomically sound, straightforward, and the IDE protects me from all sorts of relevant errors. Steve mentioned Intellij is a bit slower than he'd hope typing somet…

I developed at a Windows-centric shop for several years using C# and Visual Studio, and I can personally attest, at least in 2013, that stock Visual Studio is pretty far behind Java IDEs in its capabilities. At the time everyone I talked to recommended I get my manager to get me a copy of ReSharper, but it wasn't in our team's budget. At least in 2013, here's where I remember C# IDE support was lacking:

* No automatic incremental compilation. It turns out, this feature is specific to Eclipse alone. In my current job I'm forced to use Intellij and cannot figure out for the life of me why people think Intellij is better. Automatic incremental compilation is a game changer and only Eclipse has it.

* Limited Code analysis and search. For instance checkout this SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/282377/visual-studio-how-.... This kind of symbolic analysis and code search feels essential to me in an IDE, and stock Visual studio just didn't seem to have it beyond the basics.

* Weak refactoring and code generation support. ReSharper might bridge the gap a little here, but stock Visual Studio felt way behind.

* Weak ecosystem for plugins and tool integration. With Java IDEs I have excellent integration with unit test frameworks, code coverage tools, checkstyle, my command-line build tool, etc. I remember it taking a fair bit of effort just to be able to run NUnit tests in Visual Studio. Why NUnit? Well, our software needed to build on Linux with Mono so we needed to use a cross-platform unit testing framework instead of the one built into visual studio.

As a side note, I think the plugins ecosystem is another area where Eclipse has an edge over Intellij. For instance, when I tried Intellij's code coverage tool I eventually gave up on it because it had a critical bug I couldn't diagnose that resulted in incorrect code coverage being displayed.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#148

Post by sheeshkebab »

comboy wrote: post #22
barrkel wrote: post #19

Other language built around IDE support: Delphi. The compiler was built with callbacks to provide code completion; it runs in process, as a DLL, as part of the IDE. No accident that Hejlsberg also design C#, and innovated further with TypeScript's language server. He wrote the original Turbo Pascal (IDE + Compiler in the same executable) in assembler, so he's been building IDE + language combos all his life.

Oh Delphi.. every time I fight with CSS and think about how easy making GUI apps used to be almost 20(sic!) years ago, I feel like something went wrong. Mandatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

I've been writing web apps for 20ish years, and also still can't see productivity catching up to what we were doing with Delphi and other desktop uis 25 years earlier... not even with react and all these other webpack/babel heavy things.

Web development...

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#149

Post by TeMPOraL »

btschaegg wrote: post #112
camgunz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're different ways of programming -- it's where you spend your brain power. You can see codebases that weren't built in IDEs: they generally don't have strong naming conventions in their classes/structures/functions. One of my hobby projects is in C, and I prefer using an editor to an IDE. Because of an accident of history, public methods tend to be named like `P_PlayerCommandRead`, where `P` means (generally) "p…

More recently I've come to the conclusion that most of naming must be influenced by "how you grew up". As someone who has mostly touched the Java and Python ecosystems while learning to program, I frequently run into names that seem "weird" to me, because they replace often-used technical words (from those ecosystems) through more obscure synonyms. C++ also often had that (replacing 'map' through 'transform' and so o…

It definitely is. I started with C++, and at some point I found my way to Common Lisp. At first I was surprised at how many weird names the latter has... and then I got used to them, started to like them, and now I shake my head when I see new languages inventing new names for things that had a perfectly good Lisp name already, probably because they didn't know the concept had already existed for 50+ years...
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