chochos
commented
6 years ago About me:
- Enrique Zamudio López
- CTO at Movivendor
- Programming since 1982, professionally since 1994
- Working with Java since 2000
- Author of the j8583 library, an ISO8583 implementation
- Author of the jAlarms library
- Worked on the Ceylon core team 2012-2017 mainly on the Ceylon-to-Javascript compiler
- Named Java Champion in 2015
Kotlin is the hot new language for the JVM, and a shiny new toy for many developers. Come and learn what it has to offer, its benefits and advantages over Java, and how to avoid shooting yourself in the foot when you start using it.
Description
In May 2017, Google announced it would officially support Kotlin on the Android platform. This was the first name a lot of people heard about the language, and curiosity about it has increased enormously since then.
However, the language has been around for about 5 years. It has some neat features but as is usual with new toys, programmers tend to overuse them at first, which can cause unnecessary problems. In this talk I want to highlight some of the language's features which can be very useful by themselves but can become the cause of long "huh?" moments when combined.
The language features I cover in this talk are operator overloading, method extensions, destructuring, named invocations, defaulted parameters, data classes and a few others. I also talk about certain inconsistencies in the language syntax which can be a source of confusion for new adopters.
notes
Kotlin has been gaining popularity fast since it got Google's "blessing" when official support for Android was announced. Many Java and Android developers are adopting it to various degrees, and many programmers focus only on the new features, syntax, etc, without carefully reviewing the language design. It's important to think about how the features of a new language can be used to your advantage, so that they don't become a hindrance in the later stages of a project.