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Having ADHD, I definitely feel more like your older colleagues now compared to how I felt in my early 20s before I'd burnt myself out just trying to do regular

Having ADHD, I definitely feel more like your older colleagues now compared to how I felt in my early 20s before I'd burnt myself out just trying to do regular tasks efficiently. I'm interested in learning anything novel under two conditions, which are that results are potentially better in some way, and that the study time is paid for. If a new project arbitrarily wanted me to learn Kotlin in my personal time out of enthusiasm for code, I'd probably tell the team lead they should find someone else. I just absolutely don't give the slightest fucking shit about the company I work for, don't consider the work I do to be necessarily broadly important (outside the scope of delivering customer value) and don't anticipate I ever will. Code is just code, it does what it does, and if the outcome doesn't produce anything different or feel better to use or give me more of my time back, there's no point. But hey, I've only been employed for like half my adult life so far, so companies have never really shown that they have my back.

crdrost 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, it is especially helpful for me to get a perspective from someone who actually has ADHD! I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages. • The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful. • Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant). • Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable. • The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming... So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it. And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.

crdrost 4y ago

Thanks for sharing, it is especially helpful for me to get a perspective from someone who actually has ADHD! I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages. • The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful. • Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant). • Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable. • The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming... So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it. And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.