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I have not used it for production code, I just toy with the language. I work in a 15 engineers Android team with a very conservative lead, even as a senior eng

I have not used it for production code, I just toy with the language. I work in a 15 engineers Android team with a very conservative lead, even as a senior engineer, there is no way to introduce Kotlin. The tooling is pretty great, Jetbrains knows how to develop an IDE and it shows. Compile time is a bit slower. The language is way better than Java 8 IMO. It aims at solving all the weaknesses of the language and does a good job at that.

SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
Also, support for scripting from command line! See end of page here: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/command-line.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/command-line.html This could be awesome as it opens up for a better alternative than Groovy for tooling. Also, scripting might be a way to sneak in a new language in a conservative developer organization? Start using it for tooling, builds, testing, etc ...
- vorg 10y ago
  The backers of Apache Groovy also tried the trick of sneaking in a new JVM language by offering tooling, testing, etc. But Groovy only had the dynamic language available, so there was nothing else there if people wanted to use it to build systems. They then opened up their AST via annotations to encourage people to build addons. Then after someone did build an addon (i.e. Groovy++) for static compilation, the Groovy backers built their own edition and bundled it in Groovy 2, thus killing all developer trust in the 3rd-party AST addon market. Unfortunately, the Groovy static compilation was built by only one developer and it still has QA issues. And it came too late -- many businesses still just host Groovy 1.x for legacy scripts. Kotlin, on the other hand, built the static compilation and Android targeting first, as the primary feature, and is offering the Repl and toplevel statements as extras. This is how languages are meant to work.
  - on_and_off 10y ago
    It is also very interesting to see them partner with gradle. That way they get a foothold in the android world (since most android apps are built with this build system) and it will be interesting to be directly able to compare kotlin & groovy scripts.

SNvD7vEJ 10y ago

Also, support for scripting from command line! See end of page here: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/command-line.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/command-line.html This could be awesome as it opens up for a better alternative than Groovy for tooling. Also, scripting might be a way to sneak in a new language in a conservative developer organization? Start using it for tooling, builds, testing, etc ...

vorg 10y ago
The backers of Apache Groovy also tried the trick of sneaking in a new JVM language by offering tooling, testing, etc. But Groovy only had the dynamic language available, so there was nothing else there if people wanted to use it to build systems. They then opened up their AST via annotations to encourage people to build addons. Then after someone did build an addon (i.e. Groovy++) for static compilation, the Groovy backers built their own edition and bundled it in Groovy 2, thus killing all developer trust in the 3rd-party AST addon market. Unfortunately, the Groovy static compilation was built by only one developer and it still has QA issues. And it came too late -- many businesses still just host Groovy 1.x for legacy scripts. Kotlin, on the other hand, built the static compilation and Android targeting first, as the primary feature, and is offering the Repl and toplevel statements as extras. This is how languages are meant to work.
- on_and_off 10y ago
  It is also very interesting to see them partner with gradle. That way they get a foothold in the android world (since most android apps are built with this build system) and it will be interesting to be directly able to compare kotlin & groovy scripts.