

Kotlin M2 is Out - pron
http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/06/kotlin-m2-is-out/

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evilbit
It blows my mind that someone would post a release note without an easily
accessible "About X" or "5 minute intro to X" link...

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smoyer
I'm wondering who is upvoting this article. This is the first time I heard of
the language ... is it popular and I somehow missed it?

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rufugee
Most of us are likely involved with java in some way. Kotlin has received
quite a bit of buzz lately as a saner-than-scala next-gen jvm language. I
count myself as one of those anxiously awaiting it's 1.0 release.

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thebluesky
I'm perfectly happy with Scala. Perhaps you could elaborate. Kotlin is clearly
based on Scala, even down to many syntax details.

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andrewcooke
do intellij have their priorities straight? they don't have plugin support for
c or c++, but they're throwing money at developing a new language? what
happened to "do one thing well"?

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cageface
C++ is a nightmare language for tools developers, and is in slow decline
anyway.

Java and the JVM ecosystem is still the biggest market out there and none of
the current alternative JVM languages has really nailed the
complexity/usability tradeoffs. There's a lot of opportunity here and
Jetbrains' experience building tools gives them a unique vantage point.

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andrewcooke
["nightmare" - all the more reason to use a good ide, then...]

they are the first and third most popular languages, according to tiobe -
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

even if that is somewhat wrong - say, that they are actually second and fourth
- it's still _incredible_ that the best / most popular commercial ide (i buy
and use each release) doesn't support them.
<http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-86304>

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cageface
I don't buy the TIOBE numbers.

But actually their AppCode IDE supports plain C quite well and C++ before the
new standard and they say they intend to improve their C++11 support. Maybe
this will eventually find its way into their other IDEs.

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andrewcooke
ah, thanks - i will try appcode.

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cageface
It might not be too useful to you unless you're doing iOS development but it
does show that Jetbrains can implement decent C/C++ support if they think it's
worth their time.

However, I don't expect their C++ support to ever be as good as that of an IDE
like XCode that actually embeds a real C++ compiler frontend (Clang) in the
IDE. I think that's really the only way to deal with a language as
pathologically complex as C++.

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cheatercheater
What value does this "new" language actually add to the world of computer
programming? Don't we have enough subtly-different-yet-always-really-the-same-
stuff out in the wild already?

99-bottles-of-beer.net has 1471 languages registered, 90% of them are clones
of eachother.

Note: don't answer "it's supported on platform X" or "supported by tool chain
Y". This is not an argument. You can just as easily take an existing language,
even a subset thereof, and implement it, rather than come up with another
mess.

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moondowner
Take a look around, you'll see:
<http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Welcome>

As I see it:

\- The goal of Kotlin is to be as fast as Java and have full interoperability
with it, but to be more concise and to be simpler than other JVM languages as
for example Scala.

\- It's for people who want to code in a language with different syntax and
features than Java, but don't want to leave the Java ecosystem (JVM,
libraries, community...) and aren't satisfied (or enough impressed?) with the
other JVM languages.

Oh, and that list with programming languages isn't really reliable. When I go
to J in the table I see: Java, Java 2 Micro Edition and Java Servlet. Micro
edition and Servlet aren't languages, all 3 entries should be merged into just
one - Java. I can assume how many other errors are there. I see jQuery is a
language too! :)

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cheatercheater
Given the absence of libraries which will follow Kotlin's philosophy of code
structure, how does this improve anything? You could just use a simple subset
of Java and not use any libs at all.

