Kotlin provides the concept of data classes which allow us to create a class with a single line of code that provides, properties, constructor, ‘toString’ and immutability (if we want it) all out of the box. There are various examples of this throughout the language, none more obvious than the ease in which we can create classes in Kotlin as opposed to Java (even with Lombok). In paradox to the overhead incurred in this sense when transitioning from Java to something else in the JVM like Scala or Clojure. For the same reason, nor does this jump feel overbearing from a cognitive point of view.

It achieves this in the best possible way by making the code we write more concise but also manages to retain a similar enough look and feel to Java code which means this conciseness doesn’t come at the cost of readability. In the past 12 months I have transitioned from developing day in day out in Java, for many years, to Kotlin and off the back of this have several observations, far more positive than negative.Īn overall theme in moving towards Kotlin for Java developers in my experience, is the luxury of the language offering far more in terms of syntactic sugar and a general feel of being able to do more, with much less code. The language runs on the JVM, is statically typed and allows for functional and object-oriented programming, crucially where the former is treated as a first-class citizen (more on that later).

Named after a Russian island a little west of St Petersburg in the Baltic Sea, Kotlin was the brainchild of JetBrains and first reared its head, in terms of a stable release anyway, early in 2016.

Kotlin any type