On Kotlin

What is Kotlin?

According to the definition provided in the Introduction to Kotlin course from the Jetbrains Academy, “Kotlin is a highly effective modern programming language developed by JetBrains. It has a very clear and concise syntax, which makes your code easy to read“. Which to me, being someone with little experience with coding and a little (very little) knowledge about C# and Java, this whole concise syntax translated into the same feeling I have when I read teens writing on Twitter with all the abbreviations that make no sense and all the slangs I’m not familiar with.

To me, it’s so concise it lacks the clarity they claim it has. But even without a lot of experience and knowing basically nothing, I can see why it’s such a good language. Even if it hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world to learn.

Kotlin was first unveiled by Jetbrains back in 2011 as a new language aiming to provide a safer and more succinct (a fancy word for concise 🤬 ) alternative to Java and its first stable version was released in 2016. But it was not until Google announced in their Google I/O 2017 Conference they were adopting Kotlin as the Android official language that it started to get all the attention.

Kotlin is very versatile, I will give you that. It allows you to write code for mobile, server-side and desktop applications, it has a lot of useful frameworks and libraries, it’s completely interoperable with Java, which basically means it also can use Java libraries and it will work with existing Java code. It’s also compatible with JavaScript, which allows you to write user-side web applications and run them on a browser. And on top of all that, with Kotlin Native you can convert your code into files that can be run on any OS like Windows, Linux, iOS and macOS.

Kotlin also supports multiple programming paradigms like imperative programming, OOP (object-oriented programming), generic programming, functional programming, etc, and it’s also very tool-friendly. You can code in Kotlin using all popular development tools like IntelliJ IDEA (for obvious reasons, since it belongs to Jetbrains), Android Studio, Code Runner, Eclipse, Notepad++, etc.

After a year of playing around with it (I’m not gonna say studying, because studying means I should be learning something I don’t feel like I learned much) I can say now I can understand a bit more what all the fuzz is about.

I hope with this blog I can help myself understand the language better and help others who are on the same path.