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Probably a good way to characterize Kotlin. Scala has a lot of interesting features but also a lot of complexity. And not all of those features are necessarily

Probably a good way to characterize Kotlin. Scala has a lot of interesting features but also a lot of complexity. And not all of those features are necessarily very good. Arguably, Kotlin was born out of frustration with that as Jetbrains at the time rejected the notion of using Scala internally and instead started the long process of developing their own language. It was mainly intended to be a better Java but also to avoid some of the complexity of Scala. Groovy's lack of compile time safety is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's just not worth it for me. Kotlin gets you most of the language features but without doing that.

aurea 4y ago
Do you have any good articles on what would make Kotlin better than Scala? I work only in Scala and have never touched Kotlin.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Not really. I likewise don't use a lot of Scala. Probably better to think in terms of how the languages are different rather than better. Here's a good overview of differences: https://www.baeldung.com/kotlin/kotlin-vs-scala https://www.baeldung.com/kotlin/kotlin-vs-scala
arunix 4y ago
Groovy has an optional compile time checking feature on a per-class basis via an annotation (this has been around for a long time) https://docs.groovy-lang.org/latest/html/api/groovy/transform/CompileStatic.html https://docs.groovy-lang.org/latest/html/api/groovy/transfor... https://livebook.manning.com/book/groovy-in-action-second-edition/chapter-10/ https://livebook.manning.com/book/groovy-in-action-second-ed...
kaba0 4y ago
> Scala has a lot of interesting features but also a lot of complexity I really don’t get it - I am fairly certain that feature wise Kotlin is actually a bigger, more complex language with many exceptions/edge cases. Scala is a really elegant language in that many of its features are solved by a singular base, for example implicits. And frankly, other than that it is a very easy language - programs written in it can be complex due to its high expressivity.

aurea 4y ago

Do you have any good articles on what would make Kotlin better than Scala? I work only in Scala and have never touched Kotlin.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Not really. I likewise don't use a lot of Scala. Probably better to think in terms of how the languages are different rather than better. Here's a good overview of differences: https://www.baeldung.com/kotlin/kotlin-vs-scala https://www.baeldung.com/kotlin/kotlin-vs-scala

arunix 4y ago

Groovy has an optional compile time checking feature on a per-class basis via an annotation (this has been around for a long time) https://docs.groovy-lang.org/latest/html/api/groovy/transform/CompileStatic.html https://docs.groovy-lang.org/latest/html/api/groovy/transfor... https://livebook.manning.com/book/groovy-in-action-second-edition/chapter-10/ https://livebook.manning.com/book/groovy-in-action-second-ed...

kaba0 4y ago

> Scala has a lot of interesting features but also a lot of complexity I really don’t get it - I am fairly certain that feature wise Kotlin is actually a bigger, more complex language with many exceptions/edge cases. Scala is a really elegant language in that many of its features are solved by a singular base, for example implicits. And frankly, other than that it is a very easy language - programs written in it can be complex due to its high expressivity.