
Kotlin: It’s the little things - ingve
https://m.signalvnoise.com/kotlin-its-the-little-things-8c0f501bc6ea
======
enricopulatzo
Groovy could really benefit from a marketing team. More and more blog posts
about the nice sides of Kotlin offer snippets and arguments that have been in
Groovy 2 for a while now. Good job on the Jetbrains folks for clearly doing a
better job advocating their language as a replacement for Java.

~~~
vorg
Apache Groovy's lack of marketing is highlighted by the fact you're referring
to it as "Groovy" instead of "Apache Groovy" which is what the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) recommend it be called on first use in all new contexts.

Groovy's controllers decided 2 years ago when they joined the ASF to simply
milk the product while prolonging its lifespan as long as possible, rather
than improve and promote it. It's obvious to everyone Groovy's on an
irreversible decline:

* no-one uses the static typing features of Groovy, in fact none of the Java code in Groovy itself has been re-written in statically-typed Groovy

* virtually no-one's upgraded from Grails version 2 to 3, or starting new projects in Grails

* Gradleware are no doubt working on a tool to automatically convert Groovy build files to Kotlin ones for their next major release of Gradle, and thus also Android Studio, now that Google have chosen Kotlin as its preferred language for Android

Groovy will probably be used for basic scripting and gluing on the JVM for
quite a while though, in the same way Bash is used for Linux.

------
banku_brougham
This is nice. I don't work in Java but I've studied Java in Sedgewick's
Algorithms class. The syntax seemed straightforward and it comes across as a
powerful professional-use language.

After reading just now I found that Kotlin is a JVM language and a project
developed by JetBrains. For me the notable language feature is the null
handling.

Would I be helping or hurting my facility with Java by using Kotlin for
personal projects instead of Java?

~~~
kbsletten
I'm not a full time Java developer, but unless you have a really hard time
adjusting to the syntactic differences or will grumble when you do something
you know would be "so much easier in X", you should be fine. You'll learn the
JVM, APIs, and libraries you'll need to be a Java programmer. That seems like
a win to me.

~~~
banku_brougham
thanks, that makes sense

