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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I think JetBrains thinks too much of themselves, fueled with Google wind, they are now trying to turn Kotlin into a platform of their own, and as proven by Kotlin/Native, their expertise is really just making IDEs.

Too many recurring memories from Borland of yore with Delphi, when I see how JetBrains is trying to push Kotlin.

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>I think JetBrains thinks too much of themselves, fueled with Google wind, they are now trying to turn Kotlin into a platform of their own

Given that you champion so many niche (and often commercial) languages/platforms with 1/1000th the devs and reach, isn't this a little contradictory?

>and as proven by Kotlin/Native, their expertise is really just making IDEs.

What exactly did "Kotlin/Native" has proven and in what way?

That isn't up to the game versus JVM or any existing AOT compiler for Java.

It compiles slower, doesn't produce machine code of the same quality and requires a separate semantic model for heap management, the reason why recently they had a blog post about having to redesign it.

EDIT: Exactly for my experience with those languages and what went wrong with their adoption is why I will never use anything that isn't a platform language on production code. Either it comes with the platform SDK or no bother.

In Kotlin's case that is Android, as long as Google doesn't do one of their reboots and decides to focus on ChromeOS or Fuchsia instead.

Android is OS agnostic, barring the NDK - I don't think it's too far fetched to see ChromeOS and Android be ported to Fuchsia in due time.

Android is highly coupled to Linux, and this is visible at various places in the SDK such as: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/system/Os?hl...

But even just behaviorally it doesn't pretend to be OS agnostic at all. Setting thread priorities isn't even abstracted, it's just "uses the Linux values for this" https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Process#s...

That doesn't prevent building an abstraction layer and plopping Android onto a different kernel, of course. After all that's what Microsoft did with WSL.

That is POSIX, nothing to do with Linux.

It has already been ported, that doesn't mean it would be more than a backwards compatibility story.

As Android engineer since 2013, I'll say this is patently untrue. It is really difficult to get Android to work on non Linux OS's without virtualization.

I think that's harsh. Why shouldn't they try building a platform if they want? Who should they ask first?

Disclaimer: I have never used Kotlin. I use Scala.

All the best for them, as long as the community takes the attitude to appreciate JVM and Java for giving birth to Kotlin, instead of bashing Java as if Kotlin could stand on its own.

But Kotlin is just a much better language. Not sure if you can call that "bashing".

Which is worthless without the wealth of the Java ecosystem, but apparently Java is a very bad language.

Can't the Java ecosystem be valuable and Java the language be bad at the same time?

It could, but Java the language definitely isn't bad. Sure, it's verbose, but it's pretty simple to grok overall.

I agree with pjmlp (and I don't even work for Oracle!). I think that once Java has caught up with pattern matching syntax, data classes, fully integrated Loom and Valhalla etc there really isn't a need for Kotlin on the server-side anymore.

For Native or frontend stuff it's definitely always going to have to play catch-up and try to shoehorn wildly different semantics into the same language somehow.

So I guess it'll end up as a niche language on Android, ultimately. Not necessarily a bad place to be, though!

There is a reason why many people (including me) perceive Java as relatively bad. The language paid a great deal of resources to keep backwards compatibility, which is definitely a thing. They couldn't even just remove the unsafe package even though it was specifically announced to not be compatible with future versions, because of big vendors.

And this has a price. Bad language features stay, they make it difficult to introduce new stuff. Also, Java is very conservative in picking up new things. Saying "once Java has caught up" ignores that Kotlin, at that point in time, will be even further ahead of Java most likely.

And both of them will never reach feature parity with Scala. ;)

I'm excited for Scala 3! Scala needs a good cleanup.

Totally agree with that! Scala is already much more organized and consistent than both Java and Kotlin (no matter what some people think) but Scala 3 will make that even better - well except for the pyhton-like syntax part, haha.

Fair, but regarding the catch-up: The main difference is that Java can actively improve things both on the language side and on the JVM side. Kotlin can only improve on the language side.

I can't address your specific experiences with Java, Kotlin, or Scala but even just lambdas in just Java took a ton of wind out from beneath their wings.

It just hasn't shown to be a race to feature parity in practice. Enough of the Kotlin and Scala user bases just really do want a better Java, often in just one or two ways.

Personally, and more controversially, I don't think Java getting pattern matching in switches or sealed classes is going to move the needle a ton. (Sorry, Brian!) It's going to be Loom and Records that really change things.

> Saying "once Java has caught up" ignores that Kotlin, at that point in time, will be even further ahead of Java most likely.

This assumes that there is much "ahead" to get and that people want more features (well, some do, but the vast majority don't seem to). If the "catching up" terminology applies at all, it certainly doesn't mean feature parity with every other language. That's like a compulsive hoarder seeing a neighbour buying a lawn-chair and saying, "nice to see you finally catching up!" Once you've "caught up" with the expectations of the majority of programmers, there's not much more catching up to do. Neither Scala nor Kotlin have broken past 5% share of the Java platform, even when Java was behind mainstream expectations.

So sure, there will always be some small percentage who like more features than the mainstream fashion, but it's been clearly shown that you can't appeal to that minority and to the mainstream majority at once. Java (the language) tries to appeal to the latter, not the former.

> This assumes that there is much "ahead" to get and that people want more features (well, some do, but the vast majority don't seem to)

You have a point there - maybe the "catching up" is not relevant to the majority of the developers. I always find that surprising but I think you are right.

It'll never get rid of everything-is-nullable, though. That's honestly my biggest issue with Java. I could definitely complain about a bunch of stuff with Java, but the nullability situation is the worst.

Also, everyone in this thread is talking about Loom and Valhalla. Are those actually going to land at some point? I was starting to assume they were vaporware.

You are biased because you don't like that the age of companies selling expensive development environments is over. And you jump in to defend Oracle every discussion.

I respect your knowledge and breadth of experience, but your biases are apparent.

You mean like IntelliJ, Clion?

Yes I don't hide what I think out of political correctness, it is up to the receivers to deal with it.

Using Kotlin without IntelliJ tooling is a pain.

That is another of their goals, sell IntelJ licenses.

Eclipse and VSCode plugins tend to be a bit behind, and good luck for other IDEs or editors.

Before downvoting this comment further, take a look at their stated goals for the language.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...

>The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA.

Kotlin is available in the free community edition of IntelliJ and in Android Studio

Naturally it is available on Android Studio, how else could Android team drive Kotlin adoption as Java replacement?

As for community edition, try to debug Kotlin/Native with it.

I find using any language without IntelliJ tooling to be a pain. Not sure that's relevant.

FWIW I strongly dislike IDEs and avoid them at all costs (my reasons are varied and off-topic, and controversial so I won't mention them now). I've been able to use Vim + plugins to develop in a dozen different languages/platforms except Java/Kotlin. While it is doable it is a nightmare compared to other langs. A ton of Java/Kotlin/etc code is written with the expectation that the user is using an IDE, in some places I've worked they ever require a specific IDE.

I see you have your reasons so I am not going to try to sway your opinion. But other languages I have experience with, recently, are Go and Rust and there is no better platform to code like the JetBrains IDEs. I've tried VSCode myself and I know people who were trying other platforms, VI included. It's just no comparison.

Some people have strong preferences and that's fine but for general audience I strongly advise - try JetBrains IDE for your language od choice. Try it for a month and then go back to your old tool. In my case, JB IDEs are so convenient, accurate, feature rich and just fun to use that I find going back not pleasant experience.

ever try to use Swift without xCode?

Swift and xcode are owned by Apple, for iOS/macOS/watchOS also owned by Apple, to replace Objective-C, also owned by Apple.

Objective-C and Swift runtimes are also owned by Apple.

Not the same kind of comparison.

Fwiw, I've found that working on Java without IntelliJ to be a pain. Imo it's way more feature-rich than VSCode or Eclipse at this point.

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