introduce

Kotlin makes the life of a Java programmer much easier, eliminating null-pointer errors, time-wasting boilerplate code, and verbose syntactic restrictions from the Java language.

Kotlin has been around for 10 years, with its first stable release officially released in 2016. A brief history of Kotlin is as follows:

  • In July 2011, JetBrains launched the Kotlin project.
  • JetBrains opened the project under the Apache2 license in February 2012.
  • On February 15, 2016, Kotlin V1.0 (the first official stable release) was released.
  • At Google I/O 2017, Kotlin became a full-time employee.

Kotlin has type inference, multi-paradigm support, nullability representation, extension functions, pattern matching, and many other features of next-generation programming languages.

Why is Kotlin worth learning from? Here is an incomplete list:

  • Full interoperability with Java and JVM.
  • Support for type inference. For example, we could just write var number = 23, and the compiler will infer that this is an int.
  • You can use data classes to create POJOs in a minimalist fashion.
  • Operator overloading is fairly simple.
  • Quickly and easily extend functions and attributes of built-in and custom classes.
  • Distinguish between nullable and non-nullable types. Nullable types are checked directly at the compiler syntax level to provide null safety.
  • Provides practical powerful functional programming support: first-class function support, Lambda expressions, higher-order functions, etc.
  • Easy to create DSLS.
  • Concurrent programming with more lightweight coroutines.

Kotlin has the advantage of combining the full Java ecosystem (Kotlin uses the various JavaAPI framework libraries seamlessly) with the advanced features of modern languages (syntactic sugar).

Kotlin advantage

Kotlin’s language features can be summarized as follows:

minimalism

Kotlin’s syntax is concise, elegant and unverbose, and everything in the type system is reference.

Air safety

Kotlin has a simple and complete type system to support space safety.

More paradigm

Kotlin supports both OOP and FP programming paradigms. The combination of various programming styles enables us to express algorithm ideas and problem-solving solutions more directly, and gives us greater freedom and flexibility in thinking.

extensible

Kotlin directly extends the functions and attributes of a class. This is a completely different experience from the Util class we often write in Java!

Higher-order functions and closures

Among Kotlin’s types, function types are also first class types. The ability to pass functions as values in Kotlin directly lends itself to functional programming, and it is possible to write some very elegant code with Kotlin.

Support for fast DSL implementation

With support for extension functions, closures, and so on, implementing a DSL using Kotlin is fairly simple and convenient.

conclusion

The real problem with programming is how to personalize solutions from the human mind into the machine world, and this process of personalization is what programming languages are about. How to express expressively and safely and concisely is a problem that all programming languages try to solve. Making it possible for humans to communicate with computers as “naturally” as possible has been one of the main goals of raising the level of abstraction in programming languages.