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Comment by aembleton | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that Ross Tate (the author) is an adivisor to the Ceylon and Kotlin teams. When this was brought up before on HN [1], I found that Kotlin handled these type issues. I can't be 100% confident of that though as I did struggle to fully understand the issue.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13050491

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I've been developing in Scala for years, but lately I've really grown sour at the TypeSafe/Lightbend libraries and tools (poorly documented, half-implemented libraries with major breakage on each release with little to no migration documentation).

People like Paul Philips (yes yes, I know he's ranty and rubs people wrong and is kinda intense, but he makes good points) show that you can build a sane language on top of the JVM, but Scala makes a lot of the same concessions and refuses to fix a lot of implementation bugs in favor of backwards comparability and enterprise support.

I wrote Kotlin off originally as a late into the game pull by Jetbrains, but now I really want to take another look at it and see what type of library and JVM support is has.

Since Java interop was a #1 priority w/ Kotlin, it has the same library support that Java does. Almost all of the major libraries just work.

Lately bigger players have started to take notice:

https://spring.io/blog/2017/01/04/introducing-kotlin-support...

https://blog.gradle.org/kotlin-meets-gradle

I'm still not sure where it will end up, but things look pretty good right now.

But wrt Type Erasure, Kotlin doesn't completely get rid of it; but it does offer some ability to retain Types in some generic situations.

I don't have many good things to say about Scala but "concessions" to backwards compatibility and enterprise support are almost always the right choice. These things are much more important to more people than "doing the right thing".

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