What kind of codebase would be mostly a Kotlin/Python combo?
Kotlin Android app with a Python backend for ML stuff, maybe?
Or maybe they're in one of those places that use microservices with a variety of languages
Re:Kotlin for Data Analysis
by mike_hearn on Thursday August 29, 2024 @04:16AM
(#41388514)
Yes but it's reasonable that they didn't. For quick hacky scripts you really want a lightweight syntax that supports interactive REPL exploration. Kotlin is the first language that manages to combine a strict static type system with a Python-weight syntax, and there's a REPL too although I don't think it gets much use. These days notebooks are a better replacement for REPLs anyway when doing data analysis, but Kotlin only got support for such features very recently.
Re:Kotlin for Data Analysis
by hocuspocus on Thursday August 29, 2024 @07:15AM
(#41389589)
Kotlin isn't the first language offering any of these features, not even remotely.
Even if you look only at the JVM: Scala is much older.
I think the point is Kotlin incorporated great stuff from a few languages, Scala being one of them.
Re:Kotlin for Data Analysis
by hocuspocus on Thursday August 29, 2024 @11:38AM
(#41391952)
... which is the exact opposite of being "the first".
Re:Kotlin for Data Analysis
by mike_hearn on Thursday August 29, 2024 @12:48PM
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Scala isn't "python weight" as it's much keener on obscure operators and other syntax sugar than Kotlin or Python.
Re:Kotlin for Data Analysis
by hocuspocus on Thursday August 29, 2024 @02:08PM
(#41393654)
What are the obscure methods in the standard library?
Kotlin has grown into a much quirkier language overall, its grammar is significantly bigger than that of Scala.
I used to love python, but I feel like the attempts to tack on typing have really undermined it.
The “freedom” of being untyped is nice for quick little scripting things, but being typed is an absolute godsend in a real codebase.
Instead of making python pseudo-typed with messy annotations, the scientific/research community should have built out tools in an actually typed language. I think Julia hung around for years with the expectation that people were going to do that