Ask HN: Learning Kotlin if you don't know Java

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16331964

by outsideoflife • 8 years ago

10 8 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I want to learn Kotlin for Android development. I am a competent self-taught Python programmer. I have found a number of on-line and e-book sources about learning Kotlin, but to paraphrase all of the ones I have found say,"Learning Kotlin is simple for someone who already knows Java". Well here is the thing, I don't know Java! Is it really the case that to learn Kotlin I am going to have to learn Java first?!? Does anyone know a good first book for learning Kotlin from scratch?

jimnotgym• 8 years ago

Glad to hear it's not just me. I am considering just learning Java for Android for exactly this reason

k120• 8 years ago

I think that you should learn Java first because of all other Android code is written in Java. It would be hard to stay in isolation without interacting with other third party libraries. All Android ecosystem is written in Java.

chatmasta• 8 years ago

I asked a very similar question last week, you might be interested in the responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281374

lucozade• 8 years ago

You don't need to learn Java before you learn Kotlin. As you may notice in your paraphrasing, it doesn't say you need to, it says it's simple if you know Java already.

More concretely, what you'll find is that a lot of tutorials and books will likely assume some familiarity with Java. Not necessarily to a point that you can't learn, but more in regards to what they emphasise. For example, they'll likely talk about nullability and Kotlin's approach to it. This makes a lot of sense if you've come from Java but maybe less if you've come from a language that doesn't have nulls.

Having said that, I would expect that, although learning Kotlin should be fine, once you start developing in it, you'll soon find that you'll need to have some familiarity with Java. The reason is that a big selling point of Kotlin is its easy integration with Java. As a consequence, you'll probably find that the libraries you'll want, beyond the basics, won't have been ported to Kotlin. As there's not much call for this.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend a book for non-Java developers as I don't know any Kotlin developers who weren't Java developers first!

adamnemecek2• 8 years ago

What language are you coming from?

Kotlin is a modern language comparable to swift, rust, Scala or ocaml. Learning it is workthile as you’ll learn modern language concepts.

outsideoflife2• 8 years ago

I'm coming from Python.

adamnemecek2• 8 years ago

Might be tricky at first but embrace the type system, it’s a good tool for larger projects.

You’ll have to bite the bullet eventually and Kotlin is a nice inroad.

Ask HN: Learning Kotlin if you don't know Java

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