

Kotlin M7 Release Available - hhariri
http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2014/03/m7-release-available

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Skinney
Seems like Kotlin is stabalizing, does anyone know how close Kotlin is to 1.0?

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hhariri
We're aiming to go beta sometime in the middle of this year hopefully.

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Skinney
Great!

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lanna
Kotlin is Scala--

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Skinney
Which isn't a bad thing

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lanna
Nor a good thing. My point is that it doesn't really add much ("simplicity"
included) to justify itself. It's like Eclipse's Xtend (ever heard about it?):
a nice and clean language, but one that doesn't bring enough to the table to
be worth switching to.

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frowaway001
Agree. Especially after Java 8, it will be hard to justify investing in
Kotlin.

If you decide to pick something which isn't syntax compatible to upgrade (Java
6/7 -> Java 8), why pick something which is basically Java 8, just slightly
different (Kotlin), over something which is just better overall and inspired
the features of Java 8 in the first place (Scala)?

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Skinney
Kotlin is a good improvement over Java 8 for three reasons, in my view.

Less verbose: Not everything has to be in a class. Structural typing: val/var
a = 5; Explicit null: String? can be null, String can't.

It also helps that Kotlin has a decent JavaScript compiler (and thus can share
code between backend/frontend). The compiler is fast (unlike Scala) and it's
still a simpler language than Scala.

