Kotlin 1.0 Released

Qbertino writes: Kotlin, one of the challengers to Java's VM, has been released in version 1. Kotlin is object-oriented, statically typed and comes with professional IDE support by Jetbrains — which is no big surprise, since it's the Jetbrains employees who developed the programming language that saw the light of day four years ago. Kotlin is already in real-world use and development will be moving into fleshing out the Kotlin feature set without breaking backwards compatibility. These features include planned support for JavaScript — which sounds interesting considering JS has gained quite some traction recently. Kotlin is FOSS and is released under the Apache license.

Comments

How to get 30% of corporate Java users in one move

[Anonymous Coward]

Provide an actual working installer, instead of that Sun invented piece of misnamed, misplaced piece of camel dung instlaler. First you have the magicalliy renumbering component versions, then the "you have to formally sign a user agreement" to instlal it, then for RHEL and CentOS and Fedora and SuSE users you get misnamed "rpm.bin" piece of sticky doggy mess that violates the File System Hierarchy and whose RPM package name does not match the name of the RPM file.

There are reasons some of us gave up on using anything from Sun, and it's sad to see Oracle continued the same stupid practices. If these Java variant exert the slightest care in packaging, they can pick up a few clients right there.

JVM challenger OR Java challenger on the JVM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is it? The summary makes it sound like Kotlin has its own VM (JVM compatible I'd assume) to compete with Oracle's JVM. The web page makes it sound like Kotlin is just a language that compiles to the JVM's bytecode. Which is it? Or is it a both?

Not a VM

[pchasco]

Kotlin is yet another language to be run in the JVM. It is not a competitor to the JVM as the description suggests.

Re:So

[buchner.johannes]

So of course I had not read the link. It is not a VM as TFS claims, but just a language within the Java VM, therefore an alternative to Groovy, JRuby, Scala. In particular it is different because it is statically typed but more compressed/expressive.

This JVM stuff is BS

[NotInHere]

All the new JVM based languages that are popping up are just syntactic sugar on top of Java. The real concepts can't be shaken, as the JVM is pretty much limited in what it can do and what it can't.

Telling from the examples, Kotlin seems to be a good example: Yet another poor copy of Java with some "obsolete" things like the semicolon removed (why is there so much hate for it?), and you write "fun" instead of "function". So what. I don't think this makes me more productive than Java. Its just for all the people who keep preaching "java is shit" because they've heard it somewhere and now they want to use a "much better" language.

If Kotlin suits, Java is fine for the job as well, and most likely its even better.

Re:This JVM stuff is BS

[NotInHere]

C# is Microsoft's copy of Java. Its garbage collected and runs in a VM. Just like java. They even had a language called J# for a while (guess what its a copy of), but abandoned the project.

Java and C# and the like fill a nice niche. Nobody really wants to touch javascript, its more a mess than a language (C++ is a mess too, with std having been very limited in the past, before C++11, and thus every major codebase using their own NIH containers and stuff, but javascript is much much worse). And python has this issue with obligatory indentation.

Re:This JVM stuff is BS

[jma05]

> And to tie it all together, the .Net Runtime is a natural evolution of VBRUNxx.DLL

The .Net runtime was a complete break from VBRUNxx.DLL. Most VB6 users felt as much and many refused to move for a long time.
C# did have a strong Delphi influence since Anders Hejlsberg is/was the architect of both.

Re:This JVM stuff is BS

[jdeisenberg]

Possible candidate for a counterexample: Clojure (https://clojure.org/). It runs on the JVM, but, as it is a dialect of Lisp, I would not consider it "just syntactic sugar on top of Java"

Re:It'll be forgotten by next year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jython is a non-starter because it is stuck on Python 2.5 compatibility.

JRuby, Scala and Clojure are still growing.

Just because you are ignorant of them it doesn't mean they are dead.

Re:So

[HiThere]

You want to know what's stupid? If you go to the main web page the only description of the code you get is a sample "Hello, World" application, and the link that claimed to lead me to more examples instead lead to an advertisement for a book on the language.

If you won't let me look at it... Why do you expect me to buy a pig in a poke.

Re:Java, utter bloat to sink your boat

[angel'o'sphere]

If c programmers needed that level of support, they'd be told to go back to school and really learn the language.

Code completion is rather useful for libraries. It has obviously nothing to do with "language".

And I rather have my method calls autocompleted, especially when I also autocomplete arguments, than having the compiler give me 25 errors per file I worked on the last hour because I have a typo every where.

There are plenty of reasons why people use auto completion ... "not knowing the language" is very likely the least one.