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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Coming from writing a ton of Swift (and previously Obj-C), Kotlin’s ergonomics feel kinda off. It also feels like it’s different for the sake of being different more often than I’d like.

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Can you give concrete examples? I played with Swift in school after already making the dive into Kotlin. It just felt like Kotlin but trapped on Apple. Part of the program even included a course in using a different language every couple weeks where we went through Scala, Lisp, and some others just to see what they could do.

Currently Kotlin is far and away my favorite language but I also haven't looked into the newer languages recently and am interested in hearing pain points people have. Especially if it isn't annoyances with Gradle

Broadly speaking, Kotlin deviates from popular conventions more than Swift does. For example, Kotlin expects you to use inline if statements where in Swift, ternary operators work like they do in C, JavaScript, and many other languages.

There's also things like Swift's guard statements that can help make intent clearer and read a bit more nicely.

Same opinion. It just feels off. Why use `fun` for function declarations instead of func or function? Dropping () before { makes it hard to tell what runs first. It feels like it's trying to be different for the sake of being different. I'm not able to quickly skim kotlin code like other 'C-like' languages and tell what is going on because it's trying to be too clever.

You're just not used to it.

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...

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