Kotlin vs. Java – An Android Developer's First Impressions • Hacker News Board

Re: Kotlin vs. Java – An Android Developer's First Impressions

#21

Post by meddlepal » Thu, May 04, 2017, 3:50 AM UTC

eip wrote: post #18

meddlepal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Kotlin for services I write. My previous stack was Kotlin + Vert.x but I've ditched Vert.x for Sparkjava more recently... not a fan of the async model.

Async is fine but Vert.x's version of it is kind of retarded. Callback hell. Might be better with 3.4 now that it supports Scala and Futures.

Yes, I think you're right. The Vert.x model is "weird" to put it politely. Too many callbacks, but also I felt like much of my domain and business code was being "infected" by Vert.x machinery as I tried to make my code async friendly.

It makes a lot of big promises, delivers on many of them early on but as your services grow things... get messier.

Happy enough with Sparkjava right now. I think ultimately though I'm on a slow journey back to just using Dropwizard which still hits the sweet spot for me.

Re: Kotlin vs. Java – An Android Developer's First Impressions

#22

Post by thehardsphere » Thu, May 04, 2017, 5:46 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #14

thehardsphere wrote: post #6

Not to sound disparaging, but could this basically be summed up as "Kotlin is the syntactic sugar version of Java"? I mean, ignoring functional stuff which is in Java 8 but not on Android because Android is still(?) on Java 7, that's all I'm really seeing here.

There's a bunch of stuff the article doesn't get into, specifically Kotlin's type system which is Java-like but not quite Java's.

Huh. Okay. I'll have to read more about that then.

Re: Kotlin vs. Java – An Android Developer's First Impressions

#23

Post by thehardsphere » Thu, May 04, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

relics443 wrote: post #20

thehardsphere wrote: post #6

Not to sound disparaging, but could this basically be summed up as "Kotlin is the syntactic sugar version of Java"? I mean, ignoring functional stuff which is in Java 8 but not on Android because Android is still(?) on Java 7, that's all I'm really seeing here.

Having used Java for 7 years, and using Kotlin for the past year, I would say it's the syntactic sugar version of java in the way that Java is the syntactic sugar version of C++, which is the syntactic sugar version of C which is the syntactic sugar version of ASM, etc...

So what am I missing? Or rather, what is the article missing? (I knew nothing about Kotlin before this article)

I mean, I wouldn't agree with the classification of any of those languages as the syntactic sugar of whatever. C is portable ASM, which is a big deal. C++ is object oriented C, which is a different paradigm and feels a lot more salty than C because of the increased complexity. Java was rather ambitious (safe to say overly so) and brought with it a lot of differences with C++ that were not just syntax (which is definitely sweeter).

What does Kotlin give me besides less verbose syntax and some nice compile time null checking?