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I think I can confirm your sentiment. As far as I can tell, which, however, is not much as pertains to the JVM, apart from polyglot projects, Kotlin is a rarity

I think I can confirm your sentiment. As far as I can tell, which, however, is not much as pertains to the JVM, apart from polyglot projects, Kotlin is a rarity. I'm rather unfamiliar with Kotlin as a language. Is Kotlin for Android rather idiosyncratic as is Android Java? In other words, is there a superset of language features in Kotlin that goes beyond Android and is more expressive than modern Java?

ptx 7y ago
There is no special Kotlin for Android - it compiles to JVM bytecode and works just as well on any JVM as on Android. It has lots of language features that make it more expressive than Java (try doing constructor dependency injection in both!) but these are not specific to Android.
thu2111 7y ago
It's actually not that rare, in my experience. Job adverts can be quite misleading in this case. Kotlin jobs are usually advertised as Java jobs. For a couple of reasons: Firstly, quite a few large shops have started to use it, but usually due to grassroots bottoms-up activity of the sort that takes a while to percolate through to recruiting departments in distant departments where changing a job req is a heavy process. Secondly, there's really not much incentive to try and change job reqs like that because it would be extremely hard to advertise via job reqs We use Kotlin but you don't have to know it to apply. To a non-technical recruiter or HR department this looks like a useless statement and will frequently get "fixed" to what you "really meant", something like "Java experience is required, Kotlin highly desirable" which might just put off candidates who don't know what Kotlin is or how easy it is to learn. You're just restricting your pool of candidates for no reason in a highly competitive market. Much better to advertise the usage of Kotlin in places where developers looking for new opportunities might notice and leave the job reqs alone, and let Java devs get up to speed in the first few days. For example: https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long-but-rewarding-story-1bfcd3dc8da0 https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long... Edit: To answer your later question, yes, Kotlin goes beyond Java in a lot of ways other than nicer syntax. For instance it has a different (better) generics model, it has far more type inference, it has sealed (sum) types, it has language-integrated coroutines, it has compiler plugins that automate, amongst other things, serialization, it has delegated properties and interfaces, it has type aliases, it has extension functions etc. I suppose a lot of these can be considered "just" better syntax than Java (except for coroutines and generics), but, at the heart of most programming languages is making patterns that are possible in other languages much easier.

ptx 7y ago

There is no special Kotlin for Android - it compiles to JVM bytecode and works just as well on any JVM as on Android. It has lots of language features that make it more expressive than Java (try doing constructor dependency injection in both!) but these are not specific to Android.

thu2111 7y ago

It's actually not that rare, in my experience. Job adverts can be quite misleading in this case. Kotlin jobs are usually advertised as Java jobs. For a couple of reasons: Firstly, quite a few large shops have started to use it, but usually due to grassroots bottoms-up activity of the sort that takes a while to percolate through to recruiting departments in distant departments where changing a job req is a heavy process. Secondly, there's really not much incentive to try and change job reqs like that because it would be extremely hard to advertise via job reqs We use Kotlin but you don't have to know it to apply. To a non-technical recruiter or HR department this looks like a useless statement and will frequently get "fixed" to what you "really meant", something like "Java experience is required, Kotlin highly desirable" which might just put off candidates who don't know what Kotlin is or how easy it is to learn. You're just restricting your pool of candidates for no reason in a highly competitive market. Much better to advertise the usage of Kotlin in places where developers looking for new opportunities might notice and leave the job reqs alone, and let Java devs get up to speed in the first few days. For example: https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long-but-rewarding-story-1bfcd3dc8da0 https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long... Edit: To answer your later question, yes, Kotlin goes beyond Java in a lot of ways other than nicer syntax. For instance it has a different (better) generics model, it has far more type inference, it has sealed (sum) types, it has language-integrated coroutines, it has compiler plugins that automate, amongst other things, serialization, it has delegated properties and interfaces, it has type aliases, it has extension functions etc. I suppose a lot of these can be considered "just" better syntax than Java (except for coroutines and generics), but, at the heart of most programming languages is making patterns that are possible in other languages much easier.