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A good middleground is Kotlin. You get some of the nice features / syntax from Java without the problems. While Scala is actually a way more powerful language,

A good middleground is Kotlin. You get some of the nice features / syntax from Java without the problems. While Scala is actually a way more powerful language, Kotlin is more than good enough for most real world tasks and the tooling is so much better.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Exactly, you might even go as far as to say that Kotlin exists because the people at Jetbrains looked at and dismissed Scala as just not what they were looking for in a language. And then they went on to develop Kotlin instead. Kotlin is unique in the sense that the language originated from a company whose primary business it is to provide developer tooling and IDEs (intellij). They know a thing or two about what developers like and appreciate in their products. It shows. This language is very nice to use for programmers. Lot's of clever syntax that minimizes boiler plate. Lot's of clever IDE support. Lot's of convenient features. Good build tooling. And so on. In contrast, Scala was always a bit all over the place. Lot's of different takes on how to do things; not all of them very successful in retrospect, tooling was a bit iffy, and so on. It's the reason Kotlin got popular with Android developers early on because it provided a massive improvement over plain Java and sort of worked as a drop in replacement and was easy to switch to. As soon as Kotlin became available (pre 1.0), the Android community was all over it because at the time they were stuck with a pretty outdated Java language version. It did not take long for Google to make it the language of choice and start providing lot's of Kotlin focused updates to their SDK. For the same reason, it got popular with Java backend developers early on. It doesn't really matter what Java backend framework you use; Kotlin is a drop in replacement for Java and the chances are pretty good that your framework of choice already has extensive Kotlin support in the form of Kotlin DSLs, extension functions, etc. That's certainly true for Spring/Spring Boot, Quarkus, and most other mainstream server side Java frameworks you can name. The comparison with Scala is fair because a lot of Kotlin libraries are inspired by work in the Scala community. Additionally, it seems a lot of former Scala developers are now doing a lot of Kotlin. For better or for worse, it seems to compete pretty effectively with Scala. Either language of course is a pretty big improvement over Java; even with the improvements that Oracle has been trickling in over the last few years.
- pragmatick 4y ago
  > They know a thing or two about what developers like and appreciate in their products. Hah, I wish that was true. Looking at the last releases and the new UI which is about to come I highly doubt that is true. Although adding flashy new features instead of fixing bugs in a "visual" IDE is different than developing a programming language.
  - cryptos 4y ago
    What do you mean exactly with "the last release"? I think Kotlin is on a good way and JetBrains is investing in the right things like the new compiler. There are also a lot of low-hanging fruits in the Kotlin YouTrack issue tracker, but then again I accept that is better to focus on fundamental things like the compiler where every developer profits from.
62951413 4y ago
It actually is. Now that IntelliJ has cut ties with the Evil Empire I would expect its adoption to grow faster. But I must say that a year ago I could find no Kotlin _backend_ positions in the Bay Area. On the technical side * I don't like the idiomatic Kotlin approach to concurrency. Its coroutines are more difficult and unusual than typical Future-based libraries in other JVM languages. * I'm not convinced null safety is a big enough question to justify multiple cryptic operators. Personally I dread the demise of Scala. The Haskell lovers and the Akka license changers are certainly squeezing regular developers out big time. Databricks built a C++ engine, Rust is increasingly popular in other new OSS query engines. Those trends don't bode well at at all. Java is more expressive than golang but I'd rather use something more modern than either of them.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  > I'm not convinced null safety is a big enough question to justify multiple cryptic operators. I am. I've been working on a large c++ project recently and almost all the crashes in it would be solved by compiler- enforced null safety. Kotlin's null-safe operators don't look cryptic to me, they're more or the less the same as those from C#, Typescript etc. OTOH Java seems to go out of its way to make it hard to write null-safe code.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Exactly, you might even go as far as to say that Kotlin exists because the people at Jetbrains looked at and dismissed Scala as just not what they were looking for in a language. And then they went on to develop Kotlin instead. Kotlin is unique in the sense that the language originated from a company whose primary business it is to provide developer tooling and IDEs (intellij). They know a thing or two about what developers like and appreciate in their products. It shows. This language is very nice to use for programmers. Lot's of clever syntax that minimizes boiler plate. Lot's of clever IDE support. Lot's of convenient features. Good build tooling. And so on. In contrast, Scala was always a bit all over the place. Lot's of different takes on how to do things; not all of them very successful in retrospect, tooling was a bit iffy, and so on. It's the reason Kotlin got popular with Android developers early on because it provided a massive improvement over plain Java and sort of worked as a drop in replacement and was easy to switch to. As soon as Kotlin became available (pre 1.0), the Android community was all over it because at the time they were stuck with a pretty outdated Java language version. It did not take long for Google to make it the language of choice and start providing lot's of Kotlin focused updates to their SDK. For the same reason, it got popular with Java backend developers early on. It doesn't really matter what Java backend framework you use; Kotlin is a drop in replacement for Java and the chances are pretty good that your framework of choice already has extensive Kotlin support in the form of Kotlin DSLs, extension functions, etc. That's certainly true for Spring/Spring Boot, Quarkus, and most other mainstream server side Java frameworks you can name. The comparison with Scala is fair because a lot of Kotlin libraries are inspired by work in the Scala community. Additionally, it seems a lot of former Scala developers are now doing a lot of Kotlin. For better or for worse, it seems to compete pretty effectively with Scala. Either language of course is a pretty big improvement over Java; even with the improvements that Oracle has been trickling in over the last few years.

pragmatick 4y ago
> They know a thing or two about what developers like and appreciate in their products. Hah, I wish that was true. Looking at the last releases and the new UI which is about to come I highly doubt that is true. Although adding flashy new features instead of fixing bugs in a "visual" IDE is different than developing a programming language.
- cryptos 4y ago
  What do you mean exactly with "the last release"? I think Kotlin is on a good way and JetBrains is investing in the right things like the new compiler. There are also a lot of low-hanging fruits in the Kotlin YouTrack issue tracker, but then again I accept that is better to focus on fundamental things like the compiler where every developer profits from.

62951413 4y ago

It actually is. Now that IntelliJ has cut ties with the Evil Empire I would expect its adoption to grow faster. But I must say that a year ago I could find no Kotlin _backend_ positions in the Bay Area. On the technical side * I don't like the idiomatic Kotlin approach to concurrency. Its coroutines are more difficult and unusual than typical Future-based libraries in other JVM languages. * I'm not convinced null safety is a big enough question to justify multiple cryptic operators. Personally I dread the demise of Scala. The Haskell lovers and the Akka license changers are certainly squeezing regular developers out big time. Databricks built a C++ engine, Rust is increasingly popular in other new OSS query engines. Those trends don't bode well at at all. Java is more expressive than golang but I'd rather use something more modern than either of them.

wizofaus 4y ago
> I'm not convinced null safety is a big enough question to justify multiple cryptic operators. I am. I've been working on a large c++ project recently and almost all the crashes in it would be solved by compiler- enforced null safety. Kotlin's null-safe operators don't look cryptic to me, they're more or the less the same as those from C#, Typescript etc. OTOH Java seems to go out of its way to make it hard to write null-safe code.