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Rumor has it Kotlin was inspired by frustrations getting Scala edge cases to work in IntelliJ.
by agbell 5y ago
Rumor has it Kotlin was inspired by frustrations getting Scala edge cases to work in IntelliJ.
- valenterry 5y agoI don't believe that this is true. Because, one can just write simple Scala and has pretty much everything that Kotlin has (minus its nullability magic) and never deal with these edgecases. Even compiletimes are decent then. But with Kotlin, it is actually enforced that the more advanced features of Scala are not available, so it makes sure that compiletimes etc. stay short. It also simply reduces the burden of the IntelliJ devs, because it's not just "Language -> IDE" but IDE capabilities impact how the language is designed too. And having a good IDE is very important for productivity.
- adamgordonbell 5y agoI love Scala. The thing is as an IDE author you can't just "write simple scala" because you aren't the author, you are the IDE. You have to be able to offer your refactoring tools and other tooling for all of it and cover all the edge cases. LSPs do remove this problem to a large extent though.
- valenterry 5y agoI think I understand your posting now - what you are saying is exactly what I mean, but it's of course only true for IDE developers. And actually, I'm not sure if LSPs help so much. To my knowledge, IntelliJ still uses its own compiler to support the user at least partially of the code is incorrect and doesn't compile.