
Kotlin Edu: Learn and teach Kotlin with official, easy and professional tools - philonoist
https://www.jetbrains.com/education/kotlin-edu
======
philonoist
When I was reading about Kotlin Edu, I thought it is far too soon to think in
the lines of PyCharm Edu. Pycharm Edu cashed upon a widespread adoption
because Python was already a de-facto language be it through MOOC or classroom
teaching. Kotlin on the other hand, though not anywhere close to python in
terms of popularity, is a language built on a strong IDE which was almost
default among students(who in CS-field wouldn't know this best thing is free?)
and industry (Open source contributors who grab this free product and paid
users in the most competitive parts already revere it).

I think Jetbrains is marketing itself for a huge investment into the future by
giving itself away free to right people( for now). Kotlin, given its
partnership with Google for Android Dev and its popular opinion as 'what Scala
should have been' is already winning a slow battle to replace Java. I guess
Jetbrains will gain more this way than Oracle did with Sun and Java.

In steps the Edu version and a little bit of convincing that it is a good
learning language for universities to teach programming, language design
features, design patterns, implementation of complex and abstract algorithms,
and how better off it is replacing Java in industry.

This is a huge step. This is a surprising business strategy to gain
competitive advantage for a noob like me to learn.

