

String foo = bar = 1 ? getMessage () : "Hello World!" Public class Person Īs you can see, without using any libraries, Kotlin drastically reduces the boilerplate involved in writing a data class. Kotlin solves this issue by using a type system that differentiates between nullable references and non-nullable references. Forty-four years later, he described his invention as a billion dollar mistake, due to the innumerable problems caused by this design flaw. In 1965, Tony Hoare, developer of ALGOL W and the Quick Sort algorithm, unleashed the infamous null reference upon the world. The second half is a discussion of some of the disadvantages of using Kotlin instead of Java.Īrguably the best feature of Kotlin is its null-safety. The first half of this post is a discussion of some of the key features of Kotlin that make it stand out. As you can see, IntelliJ IDEA has great support for Kotlin, which is extremely beneficial given that Android Studio is built on top of the IDE, thus making Kotlin a first-class citizen in the world of Android development.Īs you are reading this blog post I would recommend trying out the examples here, and you will see first hand the advantages and disadvantages of the language. Due to the similarities with Java, the language is easy (and thus cheap) to learn, especially given Intellij IDEA’s automatic Java to Kotlin converter which runs automatically when you copy-paste Java code into the editor. As a result of this, Kotlin is interoperable with Java when written for the JVM or Android, and - with a little difficulty - JavaScript too. Kotlin was initially designed to join the ranks of the JVM languages but has quickly expanded to other platforms in 2017 version 1.2 was released which enabled developers to transpile Kotlin code to JavaScript. Released in February 2016, Kotlin is an open source language initially developed by JetBrains and named after Kotlin Island which is off the west coast of St Petersburg in Russia.
