4 ms·

Is it really that great? Seems like Swift for the JVM. Sure it's great, but there are a lot of similar things out there.

guelo 9y ago
Fun fact, swift took some of its early inspiration from kotlin.
- virtualwhys 9y ago
  and a large part of Kotlin's inspiration is directly copied from Scala (data classes, val, var, pattern matching, sealed classes, type param on right, tuple destructuring assignment, type aliases, etc., etc.). It would be far more accurate to say that Swift took inspiration from Scala (and Scala from ML, Smalltalk, Haskell, etc.)
  - Noseshine 9y ago
    And everybody takes inspiration for everything from somebody else and it can all be traced back to ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome. Yes we get it, nothing is an original idea. Thought experiment: To be truly "original" a child that grew up with wolves in the jungle would have to come up with it (okay, not even that since it learns from the wolves). Everything else is "not truly original". Duh. Now that we have established that no truly "original" ideas exist in any human's head (assuming "original" means going from totally empty, nothingness, to the idea), can we just get rid of all comments pointing out that X didn't really invent Y but was inspired by P? Of course, what I just wrote isn't original in the slightest, I just don't know the names of all the people who said it before.
    - virtualwhys 9y ago
      Well, no, Scala took inspiration from various languages of decades past and combined them together into an modern OO/FP hybrid. Kotlin copied Scala directly, renaming `def` to `fun`, `case` to `data` and so on. There's a big difference between creating and copying. Anyway, in hindsight it was a great idea to cherry pick from Scala as the language seems poised for much bigger things (i.e. potentially becoming a mainstream language).
- alblue 9y ago
  Source? The Swift project's initial commit[1] was 6 months before Kotlin's initial commit[2], so I fail to see how something started six months earlier could have taken its early inspiration from a language that didn't exist yet. [1] https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/18844bc65229786b96b89a... [2] https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/3e4dce385331c91c9059fcdcea3eae2394f34942 https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/3e4dce385331c91c9...
  - stoolpigeon 9y ago
    Jetbrains unveiled Kotlin in 2011, it had been under development for a year at that time. Swift was introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference. That's what I get at wikipedia for each language.
nimbix 9y ago
It must be pretty good. I was at the IO keynote and when they announced Kotlin support for Android, the guy sitting in front of me had to remove his sunglasses and wipe away tears of joy. Twice.
krschultz 9y ago
The key thing is that on mobile you are stuck with what the platform owners allow. On Android that's pretty much the JVM. You can get away with some things in native code (C, C++, now Go?), but most of the Android framework lives in the Java layer. Kotlin is pretty much your only option other than Java that works. The other JVM languages (Clojure, Scala, Groovy, etc) are quite a bit heavier and that's still an issue on mobile.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  This comment should be near the top for those of us who don't code on mobile platforms.
izacus 9y ago
Most people until now were stuck with Java 6 on Android. It's a HUGE jump from there :)
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Ah that makes more sense.

guelo 9y ago

Fun fact, swift took some of its early inspiration from kotlin.

virtualwhys 9y ago
and a large part of Kotlin's inspiration is directly copied from Scala (data classes, val, var, pattern matching, sealed classes, type param on right, tuple destructuring assignment, type aliases, etc., etc.). It would be far more accurate to say that Swift took inspiration from Scala (and Scala from ML, Smalltalk, Haskell, etc.)
- Noseshine 9y ago
  And everybody takes inspiration for everything from somebody else and it can all be traced back to ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome. Yes we get it, nothing is an original idea. Thought experiment: To be truly "original" a child that grew up with wolves in the jungle would have to come up with it (okay, not even that since it learns from the wolves). Everything else is "not truly original". Duh. Now that we have established that no truly "original" ideas exist in any human's head (assuming "original" means going from totally empty, nothingness, to the idea), can we just get rid of all comments pointing out that X didn't really invent Y but was inspired by P? Of course, what I just wrote isn't original in the slightest, I just don't know the names of all the people who said it before.
  - virtualwhys 9y ago
    Well, no, Scala took inspiration from various languages of decades past and combined them together into an modern OO/FP hybrid. Kotlin copied Scala directly, renaming `def` to `fun`, `case` to `data` and so on. There's a big difference between creating and copying. Anyway, in hindsight it was a great idea to cherry pick from Scala as the language seems poised for much bigger things (i.e. potentially becoming a mainstream language).
alblue 9y ago
Source? The Swift project's initial commit[1] was 6 months before Kotlin's initial commit[2], so I fail to see how something started six months earlier could have taken its early inspiration from a language that didn't exist yet. [1] https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/18844bc65229786b96b89a... [2] https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/3e4dce385331c91c9059fcdcea3eae2394f34942 https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/3e4dce385331c91c9...
- stoolpigeon 9y ago
  Jetbrains unveiled Kotlin in 2011, it had been under development for a year at that time. Swift was introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference. That's what I get at wikipedia for each language.

nimbix 9y ago

It must be pretty good. I was at the IO keynote and when they announced Kotlin support for Android, the guy sitting in front of me had to remove his sunglasses and wipe away tears of joy. Twice.

krschultz 9y ago

The key thing is that on mobile you are stuck with what the platform owners allow. On Android that's pretty much the JVM. You can get away with some things in native code (C, C++, now Go?), but most of the Android framework lives in the Java layer. Kotlin is pretty much your only option other than Java that works. The other JVM languages (Clojure, Scala, Groovy, etc) are quite a bit heavier and that's still an issue on mobile.

throwaway7645 9y ago
This comment should be near the top for those of us who don't code on mobile platforms.

izacus 9y ago

Most people until now were stuck with Java 6 on Android. It's a HUGE jump from there :)

throwaway7645 9y ago
Ah that makes more sense.