Kotlin is a modern, statically typed, Android-compatible language that fixes many Java problems, such as null pointer exceptions or excessive code verbosity. Kotlin is a language inspired by Swift, Scala, Groovy, C#, and many other languages. Kotlin was designed by JetBrains professionals, based on analysis of both developers experiences, best usage guidelines (most important are clean code and effective Java), and data about this language's usage. Deep analysis of other programming languages has been done. Kotlin tries hard to not repeat the mistakes from other languages and take advantage of their most useful features. When working with Kotlin, we can really feel that this is a mature and well-designed language.
Kotlin takes application development to a whole new level by improving code quality and safety and boosting developer performance. Official Kotlin support for the Android platform was announced by Google in 2017, but the Kotlin language has been here for some time. It has a very active community and Kotlin adoption on the Android platform is already growing quickly. We can describe Kotlin as a safe, expressive, concise, versatile, and tool-friendly language that has great interoperability with Java and JavaScript. Let's discuss these features:
Safety: Kotlin offers safety features in terms of nullability and immutability. Kotlin is statically typed, so the type of every expression is known at compile time. The compiler can verify that whatever property or method we are trying to access of a particular class instance actually exists. This should be familiar from Java which is also statically typed, but unlike Java, Kotlin type system is much more strict (safe). We have to explicitly tell the compiler whether the given variable can store null values. This allows making the program fail at compile time instead of throwing a
NullPointerExceptionat runtime:
- Easy debugging: Bugs can be detected much faster during the development phase, instead of crashing the application after it is released and thus damaging the user experience. Kotlin offers a convenient way to work with immutable data. For example, it can distinguish mutable (read-write) and immutable (read-only) collections by providing convenient interfaces (under the hood collections are still mutable).
- Conciseness: Most of the Java verbosity was eliminated. We need less code to achieve common tasks and thus the amount of boilerplate code is greatly reduced, even comparing Kotlin to Java 8. As a result, the code is also easier to read and understand (expressive).
- Interoperability: Kotlin is designed to seamlessly work side by side with Java (cross-language project). The existing ecosystem of Java libraries and frameworks works with Kotlin without any performance penalties. Many Java libraries even Kotlin-specific versions that allow more idiomatic usage with Kotlin. Kotlin classes can also be directly instantiated and transparently referenced from Java code without any special semantics and vice versa. This allows us to incorporate Kotlin into existing Android projects and use Kotlin easily together with Java (if we want to).
- Versatility: We can target many platforms, including mobile applications (Android), server-side applications (backend), desktop applications, frontend code running in the browser, and even build systems (Gradle).
Any programming language is only as good as its tool support. Kotlin has outstanding support for modern IDEs such as Android Studio, IntelliJ Idea, and Eclipse. Common tasks such as code assistance or refactoring are handled properly. The Kotlin team works hard to make the Kotlin plugin better with every single release. Most of the bugs are quickly fixed and many of the features requested by the community are implemented.
Note
Kotlin bug tracker: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/KTKotlin slack channel: http://slack.kotlinlang.org/
Android application development becomes much more efficient and pleasant with Kotlin. Kotlin is compatible with JDK 6, so applications created in Kotlin run safely even on old Android devices that precede Android 4.
Kotlin aims to bring you the best of both worlds by combining concepts and elements from both procedural and functional programming. It follows many guidelines as described in the book, Effective Java, 2nd Edition, by Joshua Bloch, which is considered a must-read book for every Java developer.
On top of that, Kotlin is open sourced, so we can check out the project and be actively involved in any aspect of the Kotlin project such as Kotlin plugins, compilers, documentation, or the Kotlin language itself.