Re:Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which wo...
by thomascgalvin on Friday February 09, 2018 @09:49AM
(#16340526)
I'm a recent convert to the Church of Kotlin.
If you know Java, it takes a week or so before you're comfortable, and after that it's magical. All of the boilerplate, all of the tiny little frustrations and bad ergonomics, are just gone.
IntelliJ is a fantastic IDE, too, and I didn't bother picking it up until I started playing with Kotlin.
Kotlin compiles to JVM bytecode, and it runs everywhere I'm currently deploying applications. It can be mixed in with existing Java baselines, and interoperability is almost perfect.
Kotlin also cross-compiles to Javascript, and there's a new Native target, which I haven't played around with yet, but seems like a decent answer to Go's statically compiled, platform native, single binary output.
Lastly, there's an experimental feature that allows you to write one source base and target native, the JVM, and browsers. That finally gives me a single language that I can run anywhere that isn't Javascript.
If you know Java, it takes a week or so before you're comfortable, and after that it's magical. All of the boilerplate, all of the tiny little frustrations and bad ergonomics, are just gone.
IntelliJ is a fantastic IDE, too, and I didn't bother picking it up until I started playing with Kotlin.
Kotlin compiles to JVM bytecode, and it runs everywhere I'm currently deploying applications. It can be mixed in with existing Java baselines, and interoperability is almost perfect.
Kotlin also cross-compiles to Javascript, and there's a new Native target, which I haven't played around with yet, but seems like a decent answer to Go's statically compiled, platform native, single binary output.
Lastly, there's an experimental feature that allows you to write one source base and target native, the JVM, and browsers. That finally gives me a single language that I can run anywhere that isn't Javascript.