Kotlin M2 is Out | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin M2 is Out

blog.jetbrains.com

52 pointspron22 comments

It blows my mind that someone would post a release note without an easily accessible "About X" or "5 minute intro to X" link...

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Docs+Home

I'm wondering who is upvoting this article. This is the first time I heard of the language ... is it popular and I somehow missed it?

As you can see it's still in development, so it can't be as popular as it can be when released final.

Kotlin and Ceylon are the two new JVM Languages that have a lot of potential and I hope will be pretty popular :) The first is developed by JetBrains and the latter from JBoss, so they have good people working on them.

For me, upvoting means putting the article in my "saved" list because it's something I might want to read later.

Most of us are likely involved with java in some way. Kotlin has received quite a bit of buzz lately as a saner-than-scala next-gen jvm language. I count myself as one of those anxiously awaiting it's 1.0 release.

I'm perfectly happy with Scala. Perhaps you could elaborate. Kotlin is clearly based on Scala, even down to many syntax details.

Here are some interesting code examples with a web demo: http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/

It's amazing to me that you don't know how to type that into Google. Or should everything on here be catering to the lowest common denominator?

what other hoops do you think i should jump through in order to find out more about their product?

do intellij have their priorities straight? they don't have plugin support for c or c++, but they're throwing money at developing a new language? what happened to "do one thing well"?

I'm going to guess they believe that kotlin will payoff when they start using it to develop parts of IntelliJ

C++ is a nightmare language for tools developers, and is in slow decline anyway.

Java and the JVM ecosystem is still the biggest market out there and none of the current alternative JVM languages has really nailed the complexity/usability tradeoffs. There's a lot of opportunity here and Jetbrains' experience building tools gives them a unique vantage point.

"C++ ... is in slow decline anyway."

Reference needed. It is very much alive for certain types of software, e.g. video games.

Decline doesn't meaning dying. While there is a large amount of software that will continue to be written in C++ for years to come, there is also a large class of software that 10 years ago would have automatically been written in C++, but today is just as likely to be written in something CLR or JVM based, or even a dynamic language like python/ruby/javascript. I also wouldn't be surprised to see languages like Go or Haskell continue making inroads into areas that have traditionally been the domain of C++.

And even in video games C++ is being used in fewer parts of the codebase as more and more code is being shifted to embedded scripting languages like lua.

["nightmare" - all the more reason to use a good ide, then...]

they are the first and third most popular languages, according to tiobe - http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

even if that is somewhat wrong - say, that they are actually second and fourth - it's still incredible that the best / most popular commercial ide (i buy and use each release) doesn't support them. http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-86304

I don't buy the TIOBE numbers.

But actually their AppCode IDE supports plain C quite well and C++ before the new standard and they say they intend to improve their C++11 support. Maybe this will eventually find its way into their other IDEs.

ah, thanks - i will try appcode.

It might not be too useful to you unless you're doing iOS development but it does show that Jetbrains can implement decent C/C++ support if they think it's worth their time.

However, I don't expect their C++ support to ever be as good as that of an IDE like XCode that actually embeds a real C++ compiler frontend (Clang) in the IDE. I think that's really the only way to deal with a language as pathologically complex as C++.

What value does this "new" language actually add to the world of computer programming? Don't we have enough subtly-different-yet-always-really-the-same-stuff out in the wild already?

99-bottles-of-beer.net has 1471 languages registered, 90% of them are clones of eachother.

Note: don't answer "it's supported on platform X" or "supported by tool chain Y". This is not an argument. You can just as easily take an existing language, even a subset thereof, and implement it, rather than come up with another mess.

Take a look around, you'll see: http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Welcome

As I see it:

- The goal of Kotlin is to be as fast as Java and have full interoperability with it, but to be more concise and to be simpler than other JVM languages as for example Scala.

- It's for people who want to code in a language with different syntax and features than Java, but don't want to leave the Java ecosystem (JVM, libraries, community...) and aren't satisfied (or enough impressed?) with the other JVM languages.

Oh, and that list with programming languages isn't really reliable. When I go to J in the table I see: Java, Java 2 Micro Edition and Java Servlet. Micro edition and Servlet aren't languages, all 3 entries should be merged into just one - Java. I can assume how many other errors are there. I see jQuery is a language too! :)

Given the absence of libraries which will follow Kotlin's philosophy of code structure, how does this improve anything? You could just use a simple subset of Java and not use any libs at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com