According to Stack Overflow’s 2018 Developer Survey, Kotlin is the second most loved and fourth most demanded language in the world. Recently, the TechBeacon digital platform included it in the list of the 5 emerging languages with a bright future. In 2017, at the annual Google I/O conference, Kotlin was announced as the official language for Android development, That is why the need for Android app development services tends to increase from year to year.
Uber, Trello, Basecamp 3, Shadowsocks, Evernote, Pinterest, and Coursera have already used Kotlin in their Android apps. Why is Kotlin becoming so popular? What features does it include?
Maybe you should think about learning this technology and/or migrating your projects to it? Kotlin is a statically typed programming language, created by the St. Petersburg-based company JetBrains. It provides full compatibility with Java, runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), allows us to write less code, has readable syntax, and can be compiled to JavaScript source code.
Why use this language?
1. Kotlin allows us to write less code.
Less code is important but you also have to take into account the improvement of readability. With Kotlin, you have both. JetBrains made an effort to make the language as concise as possible, and they have succeeded. Less code, if done correctly, means fewer bugs. When you let the framework take control of certain mundane aspects of your code, you can focus on more important things. Kotlin prioritizes maximum readability, simplicity, and easing the application development process.
2. Solves developer challenges.
Kotlin comes from industry, not academia. JetBrains needed a simpler tool than Java to work with its main product, called IntelliJ IDEA, written entirely in this language. They investigated the alternatives and nothing convinced them, so they decided to create their own language. The goal was to have an effective tool that could be used in conjunction with Java and will work anywhere Java can.
Thus, Kotlin solves challenges encountered by programmers. For example, the type system allows you to avoid null pointer exceptions. Academic research languages tend not to use null at all, but that doesn’t help software engineers working with a lot of code and APIs.
3. Adapting to Kotlin is easy
If you want to make it easier to maintain the product or define the development of an Android application, you can assign two or three engineers to migrate the project to Kotlin starting with a small part of the code.
4. Kotlin is fully compatible with Java
Another advantage is that Kotlin is fully compatible with Java. Kotlin developers have access to all Java frameworks and libraries while writing clearer, more concise code. Thus, Android engineers can use both languages when building a mobile application in addition to migrating their applications from Java to Kotlin. Even if you have a large Java-based project with millions of lines of code, you can easily migrate it from file to file and everything will compile perfectly.
5. Does not impose ‘overhead’ at runtime
The standard library is small and simple, consisting mostly of extensions to the standard Java library. The heavy use of ‘inlining’ at compile time means that functions like map, filter or reduce compile similarly to an imperative version of the same code.
6. Kotlin has a strong community
JetBrains is constantly improving this language. It is committed to the project, has a large and highly competent team working on it, has a stable business model, and is even converting parts of its own flagship product for use. Are you now interested in using Kotlin?
