51–60 of 185 posts
Hmm, this does seem like a pretty tasteful design in many ways. The declaration-site variance for generics is a pretty good idea, but is still inadequate to deal with functional collections. (I use the term "functional" as opposed to simply "immutable": an immutable collection has no update operations at all, while a functional collection has functional update operations: for example, given a set S and an element X,…
I am a bit in a hurry, so I acknowledge I only quickly scanned the article. But it struck me as damning by faint praise. Like a waiter advising, "Choose the chicken parm. It doesn't have any bones, all the salmonella has been cooked out, and it doesn't have any bad flavor." If I'm going to be successfully pitched a programming language, I will need to see its power of expression or be shown how it solves some problem…
I think that is wrong approach. Kotlin has nothing special or innovative, everything was already here. But it is well balanced and industrial strength (something like java). It is simply good workhorse for most tasks. It is excellent replacement for java, that is all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I don't much mind the added verbosity, coming from Ruby/Python/JS, so long as I don't have to write so many damn tests. Speaking from minimal experience, Kotlin still seems like a big net win here. Same is true of other languages with lightweight, static type systems like TypeScript/Flow, Swift, and Go. I agree about the documentation – I think it's one of the biggest reasons the language has seen such lit…
What sort of tests don't you end up writing? I ask because I work in both dynamic and static languages, and find myself writing very similiar tests in each case.
Kotlin reminds me of coffescript to JavaScript.
As far as I know, all CoffeeScript did was add bunch of syntactic sugar on top of JavaScript. I believe Kotlin actually adds programming paradigm that's not in Java on top of terse syntax, i.e. real closure, operator overloading, pure object orientation, and more.
I am a bit in a hurry, so I acknowledge I only quickly scanned the article. But it struck me as damning by faint praise. Like a waiter advising, "Choose the chicken parm. It doesn't have any bones, all the salmonella has been cooked out, and it doesn't have any bad flavor." If I'm going to be successfully pitched a programming language, I will need to see its power of expression or be shown how it solves some problem…
I am a bit in a hurry, so I acknowledge I only quickly scanned the article. But it struck me as damning by faint praise. Like a waiter advising, "Choose the chicken parm. It doesn't have any bones, all the salmonella has been cooked out, and it doesn't have any bad flavor." If I'm going to be successfully pitched a programming language, I will need to see its power of expression or be shown how it solves some problem…
(I don't think Kotlin is such a language - I think Ceylon might be. I work in Scala at the moment)
I am a bit in a hurry, so I acknowledge I only quickly scanned the article. But it struck me as damning by faint praise. Like a waiter advising, "Choose the chicken parm. It doesn't have any bones, all the salmonella has been cooked out, and it doesn't have any bad flavor." If I'm going to be successfully pitched a programming language, I will need to see its power of expression or be shown how it solves some problem…
I think that might be what's needed for a really good programming language. If you want a general-purpose language, you probably don't want something unique and envelope-pushing - you just want a language that avoids all the mistakes that are so common, that learns from what's gone before. Like buying a table - you usually don't want a radical table that can do something other tables can't, you just want a good solid…
When I tried Kotlin some time ago on a side project I wasn't very impressed. To me the problems Kotlin is addressing are not that huge. It feels like having to switch to another language (albeit very similar to Java) just to fix some annoyances is just not worth it. Maybe prior to Java 8 this would've been more interesting. I also wonder how much time it will take Kotlin to start benefiting from Java 9 features when…
I really liked Scala when I played around with it (bare with me here), but when deciding on what to use on a project I'm starting, targeting the JVM is a downside. Can I depend on the JVM being on the target machine? If not, I'll have to deal with the dependency. However, if I choose a compiled language like Rust, I don't have to worry about that.