Kotlin M7 Release Available | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin M7 Release Available

blog.jetbrains.com

3 pointshhariri10 comments

Open articleView on HN

Seems like Kotlin is stabalizing, does anyone know how close Kotlin is to 1.0?

We're aiming to go beta sometime in the middle of this year hopefully.

Great!

Kotlin is Scala--

Which isn't a bad thing

Nor a good thing. My point is that it doesn't really add much ("simplicity" included) to justify itself. It's like Eclipse's Xtend (ever heard about it?): a nice and clean language, but one that doesn't bring enough to the table to be worth switching to.

If you're happy with Scala, you won't need Kotlin. I think we're pretty clear on that message.

Having said that, I don't agree with it not providing value. I think it is more constrained in what you can do with it and that in itself provides value. And in terms of value of Java, I believe there are a lot of benefits.

Well, I'm one of those guys that prefer simpler languages. I prefer C over C++, Scheme over Common Lisp, Kotlin over Java/C#/Scala, Python over Ruby, Go over C++/Java.

Kotlin is a language where every feature is carefully thought out, in contrast to Scala (this is my opinion, not looking to start a flamewar) and C++ where they've basically thrown in everything that could prove usefull. I guess this is one of the reasons why Kotlin compiles faster than Scala too, compile time being the biggest downside of Scala IMHO.

I also really like to read source code for libraries in simpler languages as there is a smaller chance that I find code which use clever syntax I've never seen before. Java is actually great in this regard, except that Java (C# too for that matter) is so damn verbose.

But thats me. I understand and respect why people like more complex and feature-full languages, I just don't happen to one of them.

Agree. Especially after Java 8, it will be hard to justify investing in Kotlin.

If you decide to pick something which isn't syntax compatible to upgrade (Java 6/7 -> Java 8), why pick something which is basically Java 8, just slightly different (Kotlin), over something which is just better overall and inspired the features of Java 8 in the first place (Scala)?

Kotlin is a good improvement over Java 8 for three reasons, in my view.

Less verbose: Not everything has to be in a class. Structural typing: val/var a = 5; Explicit null: String? can be null, String can't.

It also helps that Kotlin has a decent JavaScript compiler (and thus can share code between backend/frontend). The compiler is fast (unlike Scala) and it's still a simpler language than Scala.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com