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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

If you want to be on the JVM I highly recommend giving Kotlin a look before Java. Great language and excellent tooling.

I would go so far as to argue that Kotlin is the JVM's real equivalent to C#. The syntax is different, but language semantics are much more similar.

I would like to learn Kotlin, but I've no prior knowledge about Java... That's a real impediment?

If it isn't, do you know (by chance) about some resource(s) for a total newbie/newcomer to the language?

thanks in advance.

jetbrains is doing a very good job of creating good error messages, but just like any other jvm language, you can run into huge, messy, jvm stacktraces. In my experience, Java/jvm proficiency is useful

I'd say a rudimentary knowledge of the Java ecosystem is required, Maven or Gradle are the preferred deps management and build tools. It's a bit of a bummer as quite a bit of 3rd party docs assume you have already written things in Java, and gloss over things like, importing a library. For someone who doesn't have a magic importer (or worse yet, someone who is not using an IDE), you'll literally have to dig around in API docs just to figure out what comes from where (I'm looking RIGHT AT YOU Vertx!!)

Overall, the language feels pretty nice though.

I don't think lack of other JVM knowledge will be a big impediment, but it might be a small annoyance bootstrapping a project (e.g. how to do dep mgmt) and debugging (how to read a stack trace).

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