5 ms·

I feel like this is going to be to kotlin's disadvantage going forwards as languages features are slowly added into Java, they will be more 'complete'.

Alupis 4y ago
Java can never be Kotlin without breaking a lot of backwards compatibility. That is the "edge" a newer JVM language like Kotlin enjoys. Since Java's history is very focused on not breaking things (and folks got really grumpy on the few occasions something has been broken), Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. But the folks writing Java code (most of you here on HN by all metrics), mostly don't care. They enjoy backwards compatibility and stability far more than new features. The overwhelming majority of newly written Java code is targeting Java8 still - which doesn't use any of these new features anyway. Backwards compatibility is also why things like lambda's and streams are the way they are in Java (and most FP folks would sneer at), and things like Records took years to release (still technically in the Preview stage). The advantage Kotlin has, and the reason it's growing in popularity in backend development is you get all the FP tasty features you want right now, but maintain near drop-in compatibility with existing Java libraries and frameworks. This was the most brilliant move by the Kotlin designers in my opinion...
- zaphirplane 4y ago
  Adding features doesn’t mean breaking backwards compatibility, I can only think of modules since Java 8 that can maybe be. What Kotlin features are possible because of that freedom ? Genetics can be an example I can’t say it’s impossible for Java to add in out refied keywords
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    The obvious one is putting types on the right, which is a useful syntax for more pervasive type inference.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      I don’t know, in theory replacing types with ‘var’ would work just as well for Java, the advantage (or more like elegance) of ident: type syntax comes from a parser perspective.
- za3faran 4y ago
  > Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. That's by deliberate choice. They are going down the route of having the last mover advantage. Lots of people have complained about C#'s kitchen sink type of approach for example. And the more features you have, the more chance that they won't fit together neatly and cleanly. A couple of examples that come to mind, Java's pattern matching/destructoring and upcoming string templates (JEP 430) are much more fully fledged compared to their Kotlin counterparts. It also has the advantage of being the platform language. Now that we have virtual threads on the JVM, async/await immediately becomes irrelevant. However, Kotlin now has to maintain coroutines even though the platform offers a better way of doing things.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    As a C# advocate I have to say, that the C# design team is doing an excellent job. The amount of syntax I see literally 1:1 taken over by dozen other languages is really impressive and evidence for that.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      I would rather that they would give more support to F#, and improving the story on the Common Language Runtime between all existing MS languages, instead of rebooting the whole experience into C# Language Runtime.
      - gavinray 4y ago
        F# goes right up with D as "most under-rated/under-recognized language of all time" A lot of its features for functional programming got swallowed up in later C# versions, and it's the Red-Headed Stepchild of the CLR (let's pretend VB.NET doesn't exist). MS allows it to exist but it's a second-class citizen on the CLR, and, I think, always will be =(
        oaiey 4y ago
        their numbers are simple .... C# has millions of developers, VB.NET 100ks and F# 10ks. They put their focus where their users are. They presented a slide deck once about that. And F# was created as a research project and is a lot more community driven than C#. So if Microsoft starts putting more people onto that, I think a part of that community will also scream that they should stay out.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. Thank God. Don’t get me wrong, C# is a cool language but languages suffocate under so many features, most devs will simply never ever learn most of them. And some of these features while invaluable in certain rare cases, I would rather prefer a better, more fundamental feature that takes more time and single-handedly solves for many situations. Unfortunately modern languages really like to throw in everything they have seen from other languages ever, and even with very smart language designers these features will inevitably tangle (khm, swift).
  - oaiey 4y ago
    C# tries to be a system language (for writing servers, runtimes, and even operating systems) AND an application language (for writing your favourite apps). So you have now a huge feature set which is focused on efficient memory handling and then you have another feature set on writing nicely applications (think pattern matching etc).
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      While WinDev keeps ignoring such improvements and rather doubles down on the C++ / COM combo, including forcing everyone else to deal with writing .NET bindings to those APIs. CsWinRT and win32metadata are still quite far from a great usability experience.
    - gavinray 4y ago
      It's actually crazy what you can do with C# as far as systems programming nowadays. I recently wrote a database buffer pool with it, allocating raw aligned memory and directly casting bytes from DB files into in-memory struct pointers. It's very nearly a systems language in terms of capabilities.
- pron 4y ago
  > The overwhelming majority of newly written Java code is targeting Java8 still - which doesn't use any of these new features anyway. Java 8 users are now a minority. Some libraries still target it (although Spring 6 targets 17 as the baseline), but most Java code is in applications. > Java can never be Kotlin Java doesn't want to be Kotlin because it aims at a much wider audience. Back in the nineties James Gosling laid out a strategy of an innovative runtime wrapped in a conservative language that only adds the most beneficial features, and only after they've been successfully tried in other languages, and this has worked very well. Also, the Java language has the advantage of controlling the runtime, which allows us to add a smaller number of features, which are more powerful (e.g. compare records with data classes, or virtual threads with syntactic coroutines), while Kotlin can neither change the runtime nor have a significant impact on the ecosystem, and so is more limited in what it can achieve. Moreover, Kotlin's features are increasingly mismatches with the evolution of the platform. Nevertheless, we are happy that the platform offers more feature rich languages to the minority of developers that do prefer them (or languages with radically different approaches, such as Clojure), so the platform can cater to programmers with different language preferences.
- Macha 4y ago
  I don't think it can be Kotlin, but I don't think it needs to put a serious dent in Kotlin adoption, as it just needs to stop driving people away so hard and then the friction to do something different will keep people in Java if Kotlin is say, only 30% nicer. See for example coffeescript getting limited by ES6.
  - vips7L 4y ago
    IMO Kotlin is barely nicer than Java currently. Java has for the most part implemented better or equivalent versions of a lot of Kotlin's features (e.g. virtual threads, pattern matching, sealed classes). The last things missing are properties (which should be coming with reconstructors), and nullable types. For me, nullable types are not worth the switch. All that being said, I don't think the languages are mutually exclusive. As a JVM developer you retain all your knowledge of the JVM and it's standard library. Lastly, a language doesn't have to be the dominate language on a platform to be usable and employable (just look at Scala).
pjmlp 4y ago
Kotlin has made its pack with the Chocolate Factory, as such they need to now live with the consequences of being a language whose main purpose is to write phone apps where compatibility with Java isn't taken seriously.

Alupis 4y ago

Java can never be Kotlin without breaking a lot of backwards compatibility. That is the "edge" a newer JVM language like Kotlin enjoys. Since Java's history is very focused on not breaking things (and folks got really grumpy on the few occasions something has been broken), Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. But the folks writing Java code (most of you here on HN by all metrics), mostly don't care. They enjoy backwards compatibility and stability far more than new features. The overwhelming majority of newly written Java code is targeting Java8 still - which doesn't use any of these new features anyway. Backwards compatibility is also why things like lambda's and streams are the way they are in Java (and most FP folks would sneer at), and things like Records took years to release (still technically in the Preview stage). The advantage Kotlin has, and the reason it's growing in popularity in backend development is you get all the FP tasty features you want right now, but maintain near drop-in compatibility with existing Java libraries and frameworks. This was the most brilliant move by the Kotlin designers in my opinion...

zaphirplane 4y ago
Adding features doesn’t mean breaking backwards compatibility, I can only think of modules since Java 8 that can maybe be. What Kotlin features are possible because of that freedom ? Genetics can be an example I can’t say it’s impossible for Java to add in out refied keywords
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  The obvious one is putting types on the right, which is a useful syntax for more pervasive type inference.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I don’t know, in theory replacing types with ‘var’ would work just as well for Java, the advantage (or more like elegance) of ident: type syntax comes from a parser perspective.
za3faran 4y ago
> Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. That's by deliberate choice. They are going down the route of having the last mover advantage. Lots of people have complained about C#'s kitchen sink type of approach for example. And the more features you have, the more chance that they won't fit together neatly and cleanly. A couple of examples that come to mind, Java's pattern matching/destructoring and upcoming string templates (JEP 430) are much more fully fledged compared to their Kotlin counterparts. It also has the advantage of being the platform language. Now that we have virtual threads on the JVM, async/await immediately becomes irrelevant. However, Kotlin now has to maintain coroutines even though the platform offers a better way of doing things.
- oaiey 4y ago
  As a C# advocate I have to say, that the C# design team is doing an excellent job. The amount of syntax I see literally 1:1 taken over by dozen other languages is really impressive and evidence for that.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    I would rather that they would give more support to F#, and improving the story on the Common Language Runtime between all existing MS languages, instead of rebooting the whole experience into C# Language Runtime.
    - gavinray 4y ago
      F# goes right up with D as "most under-rated/under-recognized language of all time" A lot of its features for functional programming got swallowed up in later C# versions, and it's the Red-Headed Stepchild of the CLR (let's pretend VB.NET doesn't exist). MS allows it to exist but it's a second-class citizen on the CLR, and, I think, always will be =(
      - oaiey 4y ago
        their numbers are simple .... C# has millions of developers, VB.NET 100ks and F# 10ks. They put their focus where their users are. They presented a slide deck once about that. And F# was created as a research project and is a lot more community driven than C#. So if Microsoft starts putting more people onto that, I think a part of that community will also scream that they should stay out.
kaba0 4y ago
> Java cannot ever match the feature pace of languages like C# either. Thank God. Don’t get me wrong, C# is a cool language but languages suffocate under so many features, most devs will simply never ever learn most of them. And some of these features while invaluable in certain rare cases, I would rather prefer a better, more fundamental feature that takes more time and single-handedly solves for many situations. Unfortunately modern languages really like to throw in everything they have seen from other languages ever, and even with very smart language designers these features will inevitably tangle (khm, swift).
- oaiey 4y ago
  C# tries to be a system language (for writing servers, runtimes, and even operating systems) AND an application language (for writing your favourite apps). So you have now a huge feature set which is focused on efficient memory handling and then you have another feature set on writing nicely applications (think pattern matching etc).
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    While WinDev keeps ignoring such improvements and rather doubles down on the C++ / COM combo, including forcing everyone else to deal with writing .NET bindings to those APIs. CsWinRT and win32metadata are still quite far from a great usability experience.
  - gavinray 4y ago
    It's actually crazy what you can do with C# as far as systems programming nowadays. I recently wrote a database buffer pool with it, allocating raw aligned memory and directly casting bytes from DB files into in-memory struct pointers. It's very nearly a systems language in terms of capabilities.
pron 4y ago
> The overwhelming majority of newly written Java code is targeting Java8 still - which doesn't use any of these new features anyway. Java 8 users are now a minority. Some libraries still target it (although Spring 6 targets 17 as the baseline), but most Java code is in applications. > Java can never be Kotlin Java doesn't want to be Kotlin because it aims at a much wider audience. Back in the nineties James Gosling laid out a strategy of an innovative runtime wrapped in a conservative language that only adds the most beneficial features, and only after they've been successfully tried in other languages, and this has worked very well. Also, the Java language has the advantage of controlling the runtime, which allows us to add a smaller number of features, which are more powerful (e.g. compare records with data classes, or virtual threads with syntactic coroutines), while Kotlin can neither change the runtime nor have a significant impact on the ecosystem, and so is more limited in what it can achieve. Moreover, Kotlin's features are increasingly mismatches with the evolution of the platform. Nevertheless, we are happy that the platform offers more feature rich languages to the minority of developers that do prefer them (or languages with radically different approaches, such as Clojure), so the platform can cater to programmers with different language preferences.
Macha 4y ago
I don't think it can be Kotlin, but I don't think it needs to put a serious dent in Kotlin adoption, as it just needs to stop driving people away so hard and then the friction to do something different will keep people in Java if Kotlin is say, only 30% nicer. See for example coffeescript getting limited by ES6.
- vips7L 4y ago
  IMO Kotlin is barely nicer than Java currently. Java has for the most part implemented better or equivalent versions of a lot of Kotlin's features (e.g. virtual threads, pattern matching, sealed classes). The last things missing are properties (which should be coming with reconstructors), and nullable types. For me, nullable types are not worth the switch. All that being said, I don't think the languages are mutually exclusive. As a JVM developer you retain all your knowledge of the JVM and it's standard library. Lastly, a language doesn't have to be the dominate language on a platform to be usable and employable (just look at Scala).

pjmlp 4y ago

Kotlin has made its pack with the Chocolate Factory, as such they need to now live with the consequences of being a language whose main purpose is to write phone apps where compatibility with Java isn't taken seriously.