4 ms·

> First off, I was genuinely surprised by the love students and more junior developers are giving Kotlin. This seems to indicate that the "love" Kotlin gets is

by ythn 8y ago

> First off, I was genuinely surprised by the love students and more junior developers are giving Kotlin. This seems to indicate that the "love" Kotlin gets is mostly fad motivated. Just like younger generations reject the haircuts and "cool" slang the older generation uses, the same younger generations reject older programming languages in favor of fashionable, glamorous, new ones. Java went from being THE trendy fad language to the old fogey that everyone mocks and derides.

weberc2 8y ago
This explanation seems to get thrown at every new programming language. Maybe Kotlin is a fad, maybe it's not (I've never used it and don't have an opinion)--either way, comments like this one aren't very insightful or convincing.
justaman 8y ago
Kotlin seems to either have a lot of advocates or a strong marketing department. Its almost like a advertising company supports it.
zellyn 8y ago
Java was cool at allowing a couple of things nothing else did: applets, and an actually cross-platform language. But the language itself never seemed “cool” — it horribly verbose even from the start. In fact, it's much better now than it was.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Java was very definitely "cool" in the 90's.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Please consider that the competition was 1990's era C++. For every way Java's old versions were bad, C++ was bad in 3 distinct ways that often lead to program faults. Folks left old-C++-world like it was plague infested when they could, because it was a genuinely unforgiving environment to program in and no one took Objective-C seriously outside of the world of NeXTSTEP.
- ythn 8y ago
  > But the language itself never seemed “cool” The author of "Joy, Inc." disagrees with you https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/1591847125 https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/159...
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It was surely cool in 1996, vs Frankenstein C compilers still stuck between K&R C and Ansi C (hello aCC), C++ compilers playing catch up with ongoing ISO work. Then there was VB 6, Delphi, Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Component Pascal, Smalltalk, Common Lisp and a few others more. Big difference was that Sun was giving the JDK away for free every way they could. Magazine CDs, conferences, sending them free by post, whatever. I was on my last year and everything that had to do with distributed conputing or compiler development switched to Java. With teachers carrying Java branded bags.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Two other cool things about Java: The library. It had everything. Garbage collection. You didn't have to keep track of when to free memory any more. If you were in C or C++, this meant a major headache just... went away. (If you were in Common Lisp, well, you never had that headache in the first place...)
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Quite true. I already used Oberon, Caml Light, Prolog and Smalltalk by then, but it was the way Sun was pushing it no matter what that actually made it mainstream, regarding GC adoption. If I am not mistaken it was Guy Steele that stated it brought developers half way to Scheme. As for the library I remember the first commercial Java collections based on the ongoing C++ STL work, before Java 1.2 adopted their own, with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. C++ on those days had each compiler vendor provide their own view of what a C++ framework should look like, and although RAII was already a thing, very few of them already offered some way of doing smart pointers, with the exception of COM wrappers.
      - igouy 8y ago
        > As for the library … with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. And the recapitulation of emulated versus native Smalltalk UIs, with Swing versus SWT.
        8y ago
- igouy 8y ago
  > …nothing else did … cross-platform language Au contraire! http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf
ptx 8y ago
The part you quote is followed by: "I was expecting a bigger difference between more/less experienced developers, ..." So the article is saying that there is lots of Kotlin love from experienced developers (and this is as expected) but they were suprised to also see similar results with junior developers and students. The text of the survey resluts page (linked in the article) makes the same point somewhat more clearly: "In its early days Kotlin was being picked up mostly by experienced and professional developers, but since the announcement its usage has exploded with newer developers, especially students."

by ythn 8y ago

weberc2 8y ago

This explanation seems to get thrown at every new programming language. Maybe Kotlin is a fad, maybe it's not (I've never used it and don't have an opinion)--either way, comments like this one aren't very insightful or convincing.

justaman 8y ago

Kotlin seems to either have a lot of advocates or a strong marketing department. Its almost like a advertising company supports it.

zellyn 8y ago

Java was cool at allowing a couple of things nothing else did: applets, and an actually cross-platform language. But the language itself never seemed “cool” — it horribly verbose even from the start. In fact, it's much better now than it was.

bryanlarsen 8y ago
Java was very definitely "cool" in the 90's.
KirinDave 8y ago
Please consider that the competition was 1990's era C++. For every way Java's old versions were bad, C++ was bad in 3 distinct ways that often lead to program faults. Folks left old-C++-world like it was plague infested when they could, because it was a genuinely unforgiving environment to program in and no one took Objective-C seriously outside of the world of NeXTSTEP.
ythn 8y ago
> But the language itself never seemed “cool” The author of "Joy, Inc." disagrees with you https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/1591847125 https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/159...
pjmlp 8y ago
It was surely cool in 1996, vs Frankenstein C compilers still stuck between K&R C and Ansi C (hello aCC), C++ compilers playing catch up with ongoing ISO work. Then there was VB 6, Delphi, Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Component Pascal, Smalltalk, Common Lisp and a few others more. Big difference was that Sun was giving the JDK away for free every way they could. Magazine CDs, conferences, sending them free by post, whatever. I was on my last year and everything that had to do with distributed conputing or compiler development switched to Java. With teachers carrying Java branded bags.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Two other cool things about Java: The library. It had everything. Garbage collection. You didn't have to keep track of when to free memory any more. If you were in C or C++, this meant a major headache just... went away. (If you were in Common Lisp, well, you never had that headache in the first place...)
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Quite true. I already used Oberon, Caml Light, Prolog and Smalltalk by then, but it was the way Sun was pushing it no matter what that actually made it mainstream, regarding GC adoption. If I am not mistaken it was Guy Steele that stated it brought developers half way to Scheme. As for the library I remember the first commercial Java collections based on the ongoing C++ STL work, before Java 1.2 adopted their own, with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. C++ on those days had each compiler vendor provide their own view of what a C++ framework should look like, and although RAII was already a thing, very few of them already offered some way of doing smart pointers, with the exception of COM wrappers.
    - igouy 8y ago
      > As for the library … with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. And the recapitulation of emulated versus native Smalltalk UIs, with Swing versus SWT.
      - 8y ago
igouy 8y ago
> …nothing else did … cross-platform language Au contraire! http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf

ptx 8y ago

The part you quote is followed by: "I was expecting a bigger difference between more/less experienced developers, ..." So the article is saying that there is lots of Kotlin love from experienced developers (and this is as expected) but they were suprised to also see similar results with junior developers and students. The text of the survey resluts page (linked in the article) makes the same point somewhat more clearly: "In its early days Kotlin was being picked up mostly by experienced and professional developers, but since the announcement its usage has exploded with newer developers, especially students."