Kotlin, In my regard

TLDR; My love/hate relationship with Kotlin.

Well, as you may know I am quite a long term java developer and I personally think Java is in surprisingly upside right now since it leave the dark age of the -O- company. We have a lot changes since Java 8 and it all seems to catch up with other languages. I always love to explore the new capacity of the language itself, but can't deny that still feel craving to try another languages such as Go, Python and lately, Kotlin.

Since it introduce to public officially in one of events from Google (I am not sure which one), Kotlin always caught heart of many Android developer if not all of them.

But in the scope of back-end development, I rarely saw any project that using Kotlin.

But now, I am starting with a new project and when one of our team squad leader so encouraging to put Kotlin into our stack I can't help but honestly feel doubted. Anyway, The team did not reject the offer and we are going with Java, Kotlin and Go as our back-end platform stack.

In my knowledge before, Kotlin is quite like an extension of Java. And since we have so many additional language feature recently (which some project still struggling with Java 8) l, my argument for Kotlin are..

1. Switching to Kotlin doesn’t help improve performance since it still one on JVM like Java and it need additional compilation steps (every time that we build the project, which means we losing our productivity waiting more time)
2. Java isn’t good with design pattern but it never pushing all over on me. But, Kotlin wants you to understand beforehand about writing a good code. Yes, with good intentions to reduce buggy application but it seems like forever before you got into the point that you understand all Kotlin code in 10 seconds when you see any commit from your college ( Yup, It hurts productivity again )
3. Struggling with 1 tool. Well, IntellJ is no doubt a number one IDE but it isn’t free. I am mainly a VS Code user and I can’t find any worth to mentioned Kotlin Extension. even for Eclipse IDE, the plugin is abandoned.

Well, after I decided that I (and the team) can accept all arguments above. Give it a shot is not so bad right now. So, now I have some good 2 weeks with Kotlin and this is my thought

I think as if you are experienced Kotlin developer. You got a better tools to handle a lot of situations, writing a shorter and cleaner code. Gradle integration is very good and scope function start to catch my heart more and more.

Well that is it for know. This is kind of like a note to myself in the future 😉

Thank you for reading.