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Kotlin Is Better

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

21–30 of 229 posts

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#21

The only problem with Steve's rant is that he starts out describing his experience with APIs, but then it turns into an issue of better languages. Presumably Kotlin doesn't wrap the entire Android API with some kind of better API, but most Android API calls would be direct Kotlin->Java calls, so how does Kotlin solve the nasty API issue? Really, this seems to be another Java critique by Steve. He's also written criti…

I was asking myself the same question, then he wrote:

Kotlin manages to help you route around just about all of Android's Red Lights, and turns the experience into something that on the whole I now find superior to iOS development.

I haven't done any android and don't know kotlin either, so maybe someone here who does can expand on this.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#22
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

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#23
post #16

Does anyone remember when he wrote this? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht... And in the comments section he got lit up because he was unfamiliar with Haskell/Scala/OCaml type languages... and here he is 9 years late to the party touting a baby version of these statically typed FP languages. I actually laughed out loud reading this blog post.

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#24

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#26
post #16

Does anyone remember when he wrote this? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht... And in the comments section he got lit up because he was unfamiliar with Haskell/Scala/OCaml type languages... and here he is 9 years late to the party touting a baby version of these statically typed FP languages. I actually laughed out loud reading this blog post.

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#27
post #16

Does anyone remember when he wrote this? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht... And in the comments section he got lit up because he was unfamiliar with Haskell/Scala/OCaml type languages... and here he is 9 years late to the party touting a baby version of these statically typed FP languages. I actually laughed out loud reading this blog post.

Well, here he says that kotlin is better than java, not that statycal typing is better, so it's not an argument in favor of one of those "all frog legs and calf brains and truffled snails" languages;)

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#28
post #16

Does anyone remember when he wrote this? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht... And in the comments section he got lit up because he was unfamiliar with Haskell/Scala/OCaml type languages... and here he is 9 years late to the party touting a baby version of these statically typed FP languages. I actually laughed out loud reading this blog post.

[deleted]

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#29
post #18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to pass objects like that because it's a terrible idea. If you can't serialize the object then your state isn't stored and you'll possibly lose that object on a screen rotation and activity restart.

It's a pretty terrible design to couple activity state to the physical orientation of the device.

To be fair, there may have been really good reasons for it back when Android devices had 500 Mhz single-core CPUs with 32 or 64 Megabytes of RAM.

Re: Kotlin Is Better

#30
post #22
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

Borland management went wrong. 20 years...
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