It is more flexible and concise, and allows for developing complex solutions with fewer lines of code. These aspects decrease the chance of bugs and errors appearing in the software development process. To add, Kotlin programming language can be used in the same projects alongside Java. That’s why there is no need to rebuild the whole project with Kotlin. It is possible to test the grounds by writing some features in Kotlin and seeing how it will go.
In 2018, Kotlin was the fastest growing language on GitHub with 2.6 times more developers compared to 2017. It is the fourth most loved programming language according to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Sharing code between JVM and JavaScript platforms feature was newly added to this release (multiplatform programming is by now a beta feature upgraded from “experimental”). A full-stack demo has been made with the new Kotlin/JS Gradle Plugin. In July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM, which had been under development for a year.
Is Kotlin Better Than Java?
So the team decided to create a language that is compatible with Java and with all the features they wanted. Google announced Kotlin language as an official language for developing android https://globalcloudteam.com/ applications in May 2017. After the announcement, the jobs for Kotlin increased in large numbers; since then, the job opportunities for Kotlin have doubled every three months as per Dice.
- Using the example above, we can see how we don’t need to declare the variable type in the beginning of a HashMap.
- Kotlin can be said as an all-rounder language since it provides support to multiple kinds of development.
- Interoperability − Kotlin is mature enough to build an interoperable application in a less complex manner.
- It can be easily used in all operating systems like iOS, MacOS and embedded systems.
In fact, developers say that 66 percent of the time they use the lanagueg for Android development. Kotlin and the JVM are popular choices for back-end web development among programmers. This is because they require less code to be written than Java, even when the code is the same. In keeping with the idea of avoiding common mistakes, Kotlin was made to get rid of the risk that references to null pointers posed and to make it easier to deal with null data.
Features That Set the Kotlin Apart
These platform types are safe because null checks are relaxed for them. Kotlin treats getters and setters as properties using the same name in case they exist in a Java class. Similarly, Boolean accessor methods are treated as properties in Kotlin. Kotlin is an open source programming language with cross-platform and statically typed inference.
Variables that can be null in Kotlin are set up similarly to Groovy, C#, and F#. Scala’s Option monad, on the other hand, is used to define nullable variables. This can be so limiting that some authors appear to believe Scala lacks null safety. To get a better context of Kotlin today, let’s compare it with two of its “rivals”, Java and Scala. Along with it, we will also give more examples of tools and apps built by Kotlin, and an estimation of the future of the language. Most of the Java-specific words can be removed or greatly reduced with Kotlin.
Why Do You Learn the Kotlin Language?
Big projects tend to have multiple classes with the only task of holding data. As was already mentioned, Java developers need to deal with a lot of boilerplate code. Data classes are no exception, even though they don’t perform a lot of functions. With Java, you need to define a constructor, fields that will store data, getter and setter functions for each field, and so on.
Kotlin has both object-oriented and functional constructs, making it very flexible, with functional programming features such as higher-order functions, function types and lambdas. In many ways both Scala and Kotlin represent the fusion of object-oriented programming, as exemplified by Java, with hire kotlin programmer functional programming. Up until May 2017, the only officially supported programming languages for Android were Java and C++. Google announced official support for Kotlin on Android at Google I/O 2017, and starting with Android Studio 3.0Kotlin is built into the Android development toolset.
Introduction to Kotlin
Other programming languages can be dynamically typed, where the compiler assigns a type to all the variables at runtime. A good example of a dynamically typed programming language is Python. In Python, programmers can write code faster because they don’t need to specify variable types every time the code runs, which translates into less verbose code. JavaScript is also a dynamically typed language so when we declare a variable we don’t need to specify its type. Kotlin/JS is a Kotlin-to-JavaScript transpiler that enables developers to write web applications using Kotlin, which is then transpiled to JavaScript code that runs in the browser. Both Kotlin and Java are powerful languages with rich features.
