81–90 of 199 posts
To add to the authors list: time kotlinc Hi.kt user 4.5s !! (OK IN IDE on second run) trailing comma not allowed no python like package manager. import mail? no a = b = 1 // assignments are not expressions
A number of valid points, but I'm not convinced by most of your critique of Kotlin. Colon between names and types (as in "i: Int") "makes work in Kotlin harder" ? Seriously? By as much as having to end lines with semicolons in Java? : ) I understand it's a matter of habit, but how could that possibly make anybody's work hard is beyond me "I can’t imagine a valid use case for shadowing a method argument." Arguably thi…
inline fun GsonBuilder.registerTypeAdapter(adapter: Any) = this.registerTypeAdapter(T::class.java, adapter)
val gson = GsonBuilder().registerTypeAdapter(LocalDateAdapter()).create()Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or have to work with that person, which is especially bad since one of the goals of this kind of posts is to advertise your company.
A bit too far I'd say. I'd probably happily work with him.
I found the transition from Java to Kotlin painless because Android Studio (Intellij) holds your hand all the way. If at first you're unsure of the syntax, you can just write code in Java and convert to Kotlin. I agree that the null-safety Java interoperability does not work properly if the Java code is not annotated correctly (or you're parsing JSON) but I'd still prefer to have it than not. I like Kotlin because: *…
I'm unfamiliar with Kotlin in detail. Can you explain "Functions are first-class (you can pass functions to functions)"? Are they more powerful than Java's lambdas?
The biggest red flag IMHO with Kotlin is the teams disinterest in supporting the language server protocol. They are taking a very insular approach to the ecosystem just like Microsoft used to with .Net. The world has moved on a bit from that mindset, but they are completely happy with coupling the experience to their companies IDE...
Even if they did support it, you'd be getting a much worse experience with other tools than just using IntelliJ anyways. Given that they've gone through the trouble to write an entire programming language & the amount of value it provides, I really don't mind them trying to use it to push people towards their products a bit. Especially since both IntelliJ Community and the Kotlin plugin are open source.
"Kotlin changed the extends keyword into the : operator, which is already used to separate variable name from its type. Back to C++ syntax? For me it’s confusing." Not only C++; C# also. It's not very hard to confuse the author, is it :) I understand it's different from Java he's used to, but that doesn't mean one can hold every such difference against Kotlin. Not being Java isn't in and of itself a fault of a langua…
Anyone, including non-java programmers, can make an educated guess at what the "extends" keyword does to a java class.
The colon operator is contextless. Unless someone tells you or you've coded in c++/c#, you can't know for sure what it means without googling it.
Here's a case in point, my biggest bugbear with the nim documentation. When you first see nim code, you're gonna see the '@' operator pretty much immediately. You're going to wonder what it does, and google "nim @ operator". You'll then remember that googling symbols doesn't work very well, and google "nim at-symbol operator". Sooner or later, you'll find your way here:
https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#lexical-analysis-opera...
The nim documentation helpfully says "Yes, the @ symbol is an operator".
So what does the @ operator do? It's a mystery, go fuck yourself, errr I mean figure it out for yourself!
If you ignore the mystery and move on with your learning you'll come back to it via the key word "seq" within about 10 minutes, but there's no easy way to search for it if you don't know that, and by the way what a frivolous waste of time.
Shorthand symbols are worth having, but they should be used only in cases where the coding speed benefit outweighs the readability loss. If you had to write "extends" in kotlin instead of use a colon, how often would you be doing it? If it's more infrequent than once every 2 minutes I would argue that "extends" is better because it's in natural language, and thus easier on average for new kotlin developers to understand /regardless of background/.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if they did support it, you'd be getting a much worse experience with other tools than just using IntelliJ anyways. Given that they've gone through the trouble to write an entire programming language & the amount of value it provides, I really don't mind them trying to use it to push people towards their products a bit. Especially since both IntelliJ Community and the Kotlin plugin are open source.
I agree, all the language server stuff is a win for the scripting and IDE-less ecosystems, but for languages with proper IDE support it is such a monumental step back. So much that nobody working with the existing tooling/IDEs will invest time to implement a language server backend.
Java version in the article: public int parseAndInc(String number) { return Optional.ofNullable(number) .map(Integer::parseInt) .map(it -> it + 1) .orElse(0); } And the Kotlin equivalent... "No problem one might say, in Kotlin, for mapping you can use the let function: fun parseAndInc(number: String?): Int { return number.let { Integer.parseInt(it) } .let { it -> it + 1 } ?: 0 } Can you? Yes, but it’s not that simple…
To me it seems really weird to have the function take a nullable string in the first place (and not obvious that null + 1 == 0), so the right solution is probably to deal with the null values at some earlier stage – but in the interest of further bikeshedding of the implementation, a simple if-expression is pretty clean: fun parseAndInc(number: String?) = if (number != null) number.toInt() + 1 else 0
fun parseAndInc(number: String?) = (number ?: "-1").toInt() + 1