Kotlin 1.2.20 released

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2018/01/kotlin-1-2-20-is-out/

by dayanruben • 9 years ago

73 54 9 years ago

blog.jetbrains.com

rsre• 9 years ago

Does anyone know where I can get some info about Kotlin usage statistics since Android made it an officially supported language?

fractalwrench• 9 years ago

17% of Android Studio 3 projects were using Kotlin to some extent: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/11/update-on-...

ddon• 9 years ago

Link to a changelog https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/1.2.20/ChangeLog.md

billfruit2• 9 years ago

Despite being a new language, what little I have seen of it looks pretty old school, i.e functional features seemed like an afterthought and also perhaps features like pattern destructuring and immutable data structures.

lmm10• 9 years ago

In principle it's not that bad a language; compared to Swift or Typescript or even Rust it's at a similar level of conservatively adopting a few features that have become very mainstream. Every language design has to adopt a balance between making use of improvements that are coming down the pipeline and not adopting ideas that will later turn out to be bad.

In a language built for the same platform where Scala has already been available for a decade it's very disappointing though.

cookiecaper• 9 years ago

I've had nothing but trouble trying to get Scala bootstrapped (sbt is a wreck), and while it's ostensibly interoperable with Java, there are many caveats.

Kotlin's biggest strength is that it brings near-perfect Java interoperability. Almost any code that runs on a JVM released in the last 10 years will interoperate with Kotlin with minimal hassle.

Boutique languages on the JVM are old hat by now, and they're neato and everything, but most people do not have the luxury of getting to choose to base their company on one of them. Kotlin is so compatible with Java that you can mix Java and Kotlin code freely in the same project, allowing people to move to adopt Kotlin gradually, without throwing away their extant business logic or requiring the wholesale sign-off of everyone in the org all at once.

Kotlin may not be the most theoretically pure language, but it lets you hit the ground running while shedding many of the crusty, obnoxious parts of the Java language. We've badly needed a semi-modern JVM language for the working man, something that doesn't get in the way and makes the business of doing software simpler. That's why Kotlin has had such an ecstatic reception.

eropple2• 9 years ago

In a language built for the same platform where Scala has already been available for a decade it's very disappointing though.

Given that after literally years of Scala experience I could easily write code I couldn't read three months later, this is not a big negative.

Kotlin takes a lot of the good from Scala, leaves most of the bad, and gets the hell out of my way (while giving me literally-perfect Java interop--the only problem I ever had was how to annotate only the getter part of a property, and it was unintuitive but I figured it out). I'm a big fan.

oblio2• 9 years ago

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/lambdas.html

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/multi-declarations.htm...

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/collections.html

Scarbutt• 9 years ago

I don't know kotlin but if you read your collections link well, it does look like immutability was an afterthought, for starters, you can't create immutable persistent versions.

k__• 9 years ago

Yes, I was hoping Ceylon would make it, but whelp :)

peheje• 9 years ago

Could you elaborate on exactly what you dislike about these features? Or why they seem like an afterthought?

billfruit2• 9 years ago

I am not disliking these features, only was commenting that in my limited knowledge of Kotlin, functional features like these ( which I have come to like from using them in clojure) did not appear like the core design elements of the language. Like another commenter said below, in this regard Kotlin seems rather conservative in design.

geodel• 9 years ago

Despite being a new language,

It is a new language on JVM. It also suppose to work with Java libraries. So it won't radically different from Java.

pdpi2• 9 years ago

It's important to note that Kotlin defines itself as a blue-collar language, and if the feel you get from it is "this is as if Java had been designed today", then they accomplished their goal.

There's exactly one unusual/novel feature in the language (AIUI), and it's a feature that I personally find inspired: anonymous receiver functions, as it makes EDSLs trivial to write.

roflc0ptic• 9 years ago

Are you familiar with Scala's implicits? Reading about them here (https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/lambdas.html), they seem very similar. If you happen to know, what affordances do anonymous receiver functions provide that implicits don't? It looks like they make it marginally easier to add functions to some existing type, but at the cost of making the typeclass pattern less palatable.

lmm10• 9 years ago

Delegation as implemented in Kotlin is very novel; AFAIK it's the first remotely mainstream language with that feature (not counting Go since it doesn't have traditional inheritance at all).

(I think it's a very good idea, but it's as innovative as anything you'll see in e.g. Scala, so it makes a mockery of the "blue collar" narrative)

Non-representable types are also decidedly "novel" (in the sense of "wtf?"), as are some of the details of their preferred way of doing await/async (assuming they haven't radically changed again in a minor version as they did in the past).

The only sense in which Kotlin is blue-collar is that it prioritizes immediate use cases over consistency and theoretical coherence. That's not "Java as if it had been designed today", that's "Perl as if it had been designed today".

bberrry• 9 years ago

I love Kotlin, it's been such a breath of fresh air at work. I hope it continues to gain adoption in backend services and not only Android, because it definitely shines at both.

MrBuddyCasino• 9 years ago

Agreed, its close to perfect. More elegant than Java, but with a much lower mental load than Scala. Its just so tastefully done.

singularity20012• 9 years ago

is the faster now? some seconds compilation time (even for hello world) is the only thing holding me back. (plus incomplete integration in IDEa)

V-23• 9 years ago

The integration is already very good (some little quirks notwithstanding). What are you missing in that department?

sus_007• 9 years ago

For somebody starting to learn Android Development, is it recommended to study Kotlin simultaneously with Java, or should I just master Java first before touching Kotlin ?

Larrikin• 9 years ago

Focus on Java, since 99% of online examples on the beginner side will be in Java and learning two language on top of Android will be a lot. There is no need to master Java before you begin learning Kotlin, but currently being able to convert between the two is still a requirement for effective development. Kotlin simply makes your life easier as a Java developer.

thibran• 9 years ago

Go with Java first. Kotlin fixes a lot of Java flaws and provides many Java-compatible solutions to those. Without knowing the flaws, you probably would have a hard time understanding the solutions.

V-23• 9 years ago

You can't escape learning Java (as of now), but it doesn't mean you can't follow it along learning Kotlin. It does not have to be one, then the other. It's just a matter of managing the cognitive load, and that's your private preference.

yoz-y• 9 years ago

I have done little Android development and none in Kotlin. However, if it is anything like the Obj-C to Swift transition, then I would recommend to learn to write programs in Kotlin but learn to read Java code. Most examples/tutorials/solutions will be in Java so you definitely need to understand them.

However, I think it is better to write all new code in Kotlin.

phreack• 9 years ago

Kudos to the team on not just a sane style guide, but an IDE to help in keeping it! Not having to worry about this helps newbies a lot to focus on learning the language, so it's come far in becoming a great one to teach programming basics.

stewbrew3• 9 years ago

I like Kotlin but I really wish they would draw a clearer line between kotlin the language (incl. compilers + generic tools) and the kotlin-plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It seems they see the work on IDEA support for kotlin as an essential quality of new kotlin features. But guess what, there are people out there who don't want to use JetBrains' IDE, who prefer eclipse (for whatever reason) or who would be much happier to use an editor with LSP support.

If JetBrains didn't make most of their money with their IDE, they would probably put more effort in providing general tools that can be used with any IDE/editor. In this sense, I think JetBrains is hampering the success of kotlin. They should try to give kotlin a better organisational foundation.

V-23• 9 years ago

That's sort of the point though, no? What's in it for them if they were to take care of Kotlin support on Eclipse - their competitor. They don't make their living off Kotlin

stewbrew3• 9 years ago

Yes, but I personally think this will be a problem for the long-term success of kotlin.

nobleach• 9 years ago

This is my exact gripe. I appreciate that they've invested a serious amount of time and effort into creating an entire language for the JVM. But I am bummed about how tied it is to the IDE experience. Writing Go or Rust in Vim is relatively painless. I've written a few minor things in Kotlin and Kotlin/Vert.x and the non-IDE experience is pretty craptastic. Almost all docs assume you'll write some code, and some IDE will automatically add imports for you.

I left the Java world because I couldn't stand having to have all of the hand holding just to achieve simple goals. I'm not saying Java or Kotlin are _bad_ languages at all. Perhaps I'm just bugged by the general attitude that "everyone will have IntelliJ".

singularity20012• 9 years ago

making lists and maps first class citizens would be neat. mosty for esthetics: var x=immutableList(1,2,3) meh!

relics4432• 9 years ago

I think the core team is opposed to it. IIRC it's because they don't want to surprise anyone with the type used for collection literals, but it might have been something else.

Kotlin 1.2.20 released

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