7 ms·

Kotlin is committed to Android support though, and the community is coming to rally behind it much more than Scala.

glibgil 10y ago
> Is Java source code going to be the only common currency between the Java 8 and Android ecosystems?
bad_user 10y ago
Kotlin is just a Java++, akin to what CoffeeScript is to JS, a Java with a different syntax. Scala is not just a Java with a different syntax. Because of how traits work and because of how they were encoded in Java's class format, in older Scala versions even adding a method with a default implementation breaks binary compatibility, which is why the history of Scala has been so fraught with compatibility breakage. Scala 2.12 takes advantage of Java 8's new default methods in interfaces, among others, for encoding Scala's features. We finally have a Scala version that isn't so fragile. And because of the limited resources of the core team, they can't maintain different backends. Java 8 was released in 2014. I cheered for Google when they won Oracle's lawsuit, but when you're forking the ecosystem, you have a responsibility to keep on your promise of keeping up to date and compatible with the upstream. They just pulled a Microsoft and are getting away with it. Fuck Google for fracturing the Java ecosystem. There, I said it.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Fuck Google for fracturing the Java ecosystem. There, I said it. Right on the spot, yet as Silicon Valley darling they get a free pass instead of being blamed like Microsoft was. I still hope Oracle manages to force them to play by rules. Other JVM vendors like IBM, Atego, Azul, MicroEJ,.... are able to provide their own extensions, while supporting Java properly and not forking the whole language + standard libraries. Some of them do sell JVMs for embedded devices with soft and real-time constraints much higher than Android, so the whole story about a Java fork being a requirement for Android is such Google marketing for their actions.
- cel1ne 10y ago
  Kotlin is not CoffeeScript for Java. Kotlin is Java done much better. Null as syntax, extensions with receivers, reified typing, type-safe builders, first-class lambdas, sealed classes, co-routines and so much more... Kotlin is my language of choice for just about everything at the moment. I have done 15+ years of programming in Java (Desktop, Server, Android), JavaScript (ES5, ES6+), Kotlin and a little programming in Coffee-script. Your comparison is just wrong. It's 100% compatible to Java so of course it's not a completely different language. Haskell is a different language. I like Haskell, but I'm glad that I don't have to convert all my old java code to it. I can open old java-projects and use Kotlin on a file-by-file basis without any problems.
  - pkolaczk 10y ago
    Kotlin doesn't really have true reified generics (any more than e.g. Scala has), Java 8 has first class lambdas, extension methods and @Nullable now. Kotlin is just Java 8 with cleaner syntax.
    - cel1ne 10y ago
      Kotlin has generics that are in most circumstances reified enough ;). Optionals of Java8 and Guava are a terrible idea. @Nullable is just an annotation. Null-safety built in the language is the only way to go. You could always argue that a language is just cleaner syntax. Kotlin is a cleaner syntax for interacting with JVM-bytecode. Scala is a also cleaner syntax for interacting with JVM-bytecode. JVM-Bytecode is a cleaner syntax for interacting with operating systems.
      - lmm 10y ago
        Optional is a concept that you need even in a null-safe language (e.g. Haskell has Maybe). With language-level nullability you can sort-of emulate a pseudo-Optional type, but why would you want to? It's inherently second-class because it can't ever be properly compositional (Option[A] is always a different type from A and can be understood without knowing anything about A, whereas A? might or might not be a different type from A, you can't understand what it does without knowing the details of what A is). Once you start interacting with JVM bytecode Kotlin ceases to have null-safety. @Nullable is just an annotation but at least you can write it down, unlike Kotlin's "platform types". Conversely if you're not interacting with non-Scala bytecode then Scala is null-safe in practice if not in theory, because the Scala ecosystem doesn't use null and has tools to enforce this.
- dep_b 10y ago
  > Kotlin is just a Java++, akin to what CoffeeScript is to JS, a Java with a different syntax. Kotlin is a smaller language than Java (just based on my feeling actually) yet more safe and in many regards flexible. Kotlin is more similar to Swift, where Swift is aimed at Cocoa and Kotlin at the JVM. The only thing it really has in common is that it uses the JVM. But F# is not similar to C# just because it has .Net compatibility. Especially if you try to write C# in F# instead of F# according to the gospel. Just as I've seen tons of code by Objective-C devs that's just the old code translated to the new code a lot of Java devs probably won't really get Kotlin and will write the same code as they would do in Java.
sjellis 10y ago
I actually clicked on the link with the faint hope that there would be something in the announcement about Kotlin. Google support for Kotlin, or some initiative to get a grip on security updates are the only announcements that I really want to see about Android at this point: I use an Android phone, but there's no end-user things that I feel that it lacks right now. IMO, the significant weaknesses of the platform are updates and developer experience.
- izacus 10y ago
  Why would Google have to announce anything about Kotlin? Do you wait For Apple to announce something about Python before using it on your mac? (We're running Kotlin in production for a long while now and at this point I think starting development of an app in Java is rather silly considering how stable and nice Kotlin is.)
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Our customers do, if it isn't a vendor supported language on platform X, usually their IT doesn't allow it on their list of languages for project delivery.
    - oblio 10y ago
      Are they the kind of folks that demand that you use .NET or C++ on Windows? I had a colleague like that. I had to explain to him that people are actually using Java or Python in production, on Windows.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Depends on the customer, but yes that is usually the case.
  - agildehaus 10y ago
    I'm unable to convince my employer to use Kotlin. Having Google put their weight behind it would tremendously help that situation.

> Is Java source code going to be the only common currency between the Java 8 and Android ecosystems?

Kotlin is just a Java++, akin to what CoffeeScript is to JS, a Java with a different syntax. Scala is not just a Java with a different syntax. Because of how traits work and because of how they were encoded in Java's class format, in older Scala versions even adding a method with a default implementation breaks binary compatibility, which is why the history of Scala has been so fraught with compatibility breakage. Scala 2.12 takes advantage of Java 8's new default methods in interfaces, among others, for encoding Scala's features. We finally have a Scala version that isn't so fragile. And because of the limited resources of the core team, they can't maintain different backends. Java 8 was released in 2014. I cheered for Google when they won Oracle's lawsuit, but when you're forking the ecosystem, you have a responsibility to keep on your promise of keeping up to date and compatible with the upstream. They just pulled a Microsoft and are getting away with it. Fuck Google for fracturing the Java ecosystem. There, I said it.

pjmlp 10y ago
> Fuck Google for fracturing the Java ecosystem. There, I said it. Right on the spot, yet as Silicon Valley darling they get a free pass instead of being blamed like Microsoft was. I still hope Oracle manages to force them to play by rules. Other JVM vendors like IBM, Atego, Azul, MicroEJ,.... are able to provide their own extensions, while supporting Java properly and not forking the whole language + standard libraries. Some of them do sell JVMs for embedded devices with soft and real-time constraints much higher than Android, so the whole story about a Java fork being a requirement for Android is such Google marketing for their actions.
cel1ne 10y ago
Kotlin is not CoffeeScript for Java. Kotlin is Java done much better. Null as syntax, extensions with receivers, reified typing, type-safe builders, first-class lambdas, sealed classes, co-routines and so much more... Kotlin is my language of choice for just about everything at the moment. I have done 15+ years of programming in Java (Desktop, Server, Android), JavaScript (ES5, ES6+), Kotlin and a little programming in Coffee-script. Your comparison is just wrong. It's 100% compatible to Java so of course it's not a completely different language. Haskell is a different language. I like Haskell, but I'm glad that I don't have to convert all my old java code to it. I can open old java-projects and use Kotlin on a file-by-file basis without any problems.
- pkolaczk 10y ago
  Kotlin doesn't really have true reified generics (any more than e.g. Scala has), Java 8 has first class lambdas, extension methods and @Nullable now. Kotlin is just Java 8 with cleaner syntax.
  - cel1ne 10y ago
    Kotlin has generics that are in most circumstances reified enough ;). Optionals of Java8 and Guava are a terrible idea. @Nullable is just an annotation. Null-safety built in the language is the only way to go. You could always argue that a language is just cleaner syntax. Kotlin is a cleaner syntax for interacting with JVM-bytecode. Scala is a also cleaner syntax for interacting with JVM-bytecode. JVM-Bytecode is a cleaner syntax for interacting with operating systems.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Optional is a concept that you need even in a null-safe language (e.g. Haskell has Maybe). With language-level nullability you can sort-of emulate a pseudo-Optional type, but why would you want to? It's inherently second-class because it can't ever be properly compositional (Option[A] is always a different type from A and can be understood without knowing anything about A, whereas A? might or might not be a different type from A, you can't understand what it does without knowing the details of what A is). Once you start interacting with JVM bytecode Kotlin ceases to have null-safety. @Nullable is just an annotation but at least you can write it down, unlike Kotlin's "platform types". Conversely if you're not interacting with non-Scala bytecode then Scala is null-safe in practice if not in theory, because the Scala ecosystem doesn't use null and has tools to enforce this.
dep_b 10y ago
> Kotlin is just a Java++, akin to what CoffeeScript is to JS, a Java with a different syntax. Kotlin is a smaller language than Java (just based on my feeling actually) yet more safe and in many regards flexible. Kotlin is more similar to Swift, where Swift is aimed at Cocoa and Kotlin at the JVM. The only thing it really has in common is that it uses the JVM. But F# is not similar to C# just because it has .Net compatibility. Especially if you try to write C# in F# instead of F# according to the gospel. Just as I've seen tons of code by Objective-C devs that's just the old code translated to the new code a lot of Java devs probably won't really get Kotlin and will write the same code as they would do in Java.

sjellis 10y ago

I actually clicked on the link with the faint hope that there would be something in the announcement about Kotlin. Google support for Kotlin, or some initiative to get a grip on security updates are the only announcements that I really want to see about Android at this point: I use an Android phone, but there's no end-user things that I feel that it lacks right now. IMO, the significant weaknesses of the platform are updates and developer experience.

izacus 10y ago
Why would Google have to announce anything about Kotlin? Do you wait For Apple to announce something about Python before using it on your mac? (We're running Kotlin in production for a long while now and at this point I think starting development of an app in Java is rather silly considering how stable and nice Kotlin is.)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Our customers do, if it isn't a vendor supported language on platform X, usually their IT doesn't allow it on their list of languages for project delivery.
  - oblio 10y ago
    Are they the kind of folks that demand that you use .NET or C++ on Windows? I had a colleague like that. I had to explain to him that people are actually using Java or Python in production, on Windows.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Depends on the customer, but yes that is usually the case.
- agildehaus 10y ago
  I'm unable to convince my employer to use Kotlin. Having Google put their weight behind it would tremendously help that situation.