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Comment by djinnandtonic | Hacker News Reader

Or use Kotlin, it's near perfectly interoperable with Java and the acclamation period is measured in weeks if you're a Java dev

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As they point out, they already have some Kotlin and use it interoperably, but "rewrite existing code in Kotlin" is not a realistic demand.

My experience has been that "migrate on touch" is a reasonable strategy, so if you have to make a change to a file, use the "Code > Convert Java to Kotlin" (control-alt-shift-k)

A reasonable strategy if you never ever merge two branches. If there's a non-homeopathic chance that a parallel change to the file in question might eventually pop up I'd limit "migrate on touch" to occasions when you do major rework and not just a minor touch. If it's possible to occasionally enforce a "branch singularity moment" I'd go with migrate on major rework until a branch singularity opportunity comes up and then do the bulk conversion to what I affectionately call "shit kotlin" (the endless procession of exclamation marks that faithfully recreate each and every opportunity where the java could, in theory, achieve an NPE) in one go. And leave only the cleanup of that mess to "on touch". If it later comes to parallel cleanup, that wont be half as annoying to merge, not even remotely.

What I haven't tried is "migrate on touch" with a strict rule that there must be explicit commits just before and after the conversion (plus a third commit documenting the file rename separately, before or after). That could perhaps work out well - or not help much at all, I don't feel like I could even guess.

But other than that, the intermediate state of partial conversion is surprisingly acceptable to work with, I'm not disagreeing!

IIUC, there's already automated tooling that will do the conversion and not produce a giant mess like c/c++ to rust does so the cost is predominately CPU and not SWE.

But then you have to use Kotlin, which isn't just Java with nullability types, but a language with quite a different design philosophy, and a language that is increasingly at odds with the evolution of the JDK (partly but not solely because it also targets other platforms, such as Android and JS). It appeals to some but certainly not to all (interestingly, it hasn't significantly affected the portion of Java platform developers using alternative languages, which has remained pretty much constant at about 10% for the past 15 years).

I tried Kotlin, and while I liked it, iterop was still somewhat annoying, Java's lambdas are better, using the Java 8 stream API is ugly, and the code ends up being similar enough that I'd rather use Java and avoid tooling hassles.

The article actually addresses Kotlin. They'd love to switch to it but they just can't do it overnight because they have so much mission critical Java code. So, this is a stop gap solution for legacy code. They published another article some time ago how they are switching to Kotlin: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/24/android/android-java-k...

Migrating millions of lines of code is a non trivial effort. They'll be stuck with bits of Java for quite some time. So, this helps make that less painful.

And simply delete however many millions of lines of java code already exists :)

Kotlin interops nicely with Java but it's not null-safe (all references from Java are assumed non-null).

That is wrong all, non annotated Java code gets a special type denoted with a ! . You can use ?. or assign it to a new val with ?: return.

Or you throw all the null safety away and write unsafe java code but in Kotlin the same as the Java code you're working with.

You can use ?. or assign to a nullable type. Or you can get a NPE at runtime. Which is to say, it's not null-safe.

So you're in the exact same case as you were in Java, which was my third point. But the type is a special type to let you know what you're doing is unsafe.

> the acclamation period is measured in weeks

Ah, "acclimation" -- thought at first you were saying that Java devs love it for a few weeks and then hate it lol.

Migrating from Java to Kotlin looks nice and easy on the surface (optionals!), but the lack of checked exceptions will absolutely bite you sooner or later if you are consuming Java code. Better carefully read the docs and source of all your transitive Java dependencies.

I can't think of any popular language that would take more than a few days to get acclimated to as an experienced developer, so that's not a very compelling argument.

Ooof, I think most devs can modify an existing code base in a few days. To learn all the idiomatic styles, tradeoffs of the major libraries and different build systems take months, maybe years IMHO.

Well, C and Scala are some counter examples that immediately come to mind.

Kotlin is probably more similar to Java than any other mainstream language. There’s almost no learning curve there, while going from Java to other “easy” languages like Python requires significantly more time to get used to.

Scala it depends how you want to use it. If you're going for full FP then sure it can take a little bit longer, but you can also just use it like Java+ if you really want...

I think there's a difference here between getting acclimated to scala (for new code, presumably), which is reasonably easy, and getting acclimated to a scala codebase that was already written by someone else.

You can do the first one basically the same way you'd do kotlin, the second one can get pretty hairy if someone decided to bring in a bunch of macro heavy DSLs and syntax extensions.

It's always the (usually quite bad) tooling, learning about platform/SDK shittiness and pitfalls, and figuring out which parts of the open-source library ecosystem you want to engage with, that takes like 90+% of the time getting decent with a new language, in my experience. Getting comfortable with the language per se takes low tens of hours at most, as you wrote.

Kotlin (the base language) is really not that different from java. I went from 0 to standing up new backend services with limited friction. Coroutines and maybe frontends are a different story. Java doesn't yet have a coroutines equiv so that was a larger hurdle for me.

Most of the changes for me from 10/20+ hours to now we're more about identifying a style that works as effectively as I can. These types of behaviours are normal in all but the most idiomatic languages, so if anyone is doing java dev as their daily language, Kotlin felt very natural(though you really are limited to Intellij since the IDE does a ton of lifting to make your life easy).

I can't think of many other languages that will compile into a Java codebase, and be interoprable in both directions, as well as Kotlin. It's a lot quicker to pick up than e.g. Scala IMHO.

Rust can take a while if you don't know either C++ or Haskell.

C++? Java? Rust?

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