One of the most important aspects of starting a business is deciding on the technology used to construct your product. This is a critical decision that will impact your company’s entire trajectory in the long run. We’ll take a look at the Kotlin programming language today.
Kotlin is a relatively new language developed by the Russian company JetBrains. It debuted in 2011. The Android development team announced official support for Kotlin for Android app development at the Google I/O 2017 conference. Kotlin, like Java, C, and C++, is a statically typed language. It can be used for both object-oriented and procedural programming.
The project is 2-3 times more compact, easier to read, and more reliable in NullPointerException protection when written in Kotlin. These capabilities enable Kotlin to cut development time and defect count by twofold, lowering the cost of building and owning a software product.
There is a List the Advantages that Kotlin Offers Out of the Box:
- A lot of elements that reduce the boiler plate: data class, getters&setters-significantly reduces the amount of code.
- A more well-thought-out and user-friendly class structure: instead of HashMap, for example, Map (immutable) and MutableMap (mutable) — allow beginners to easily enter the language and focus on the business statement, rather than on the implementation methods.
- Various protections, such as null protection, come Straight out of the box:
var str: String = “”
str = null // this will be a compilation error, not runtime
var nullableStr: String? = null // and so you can
— which leads to significant reductions in program errors and lower support costs.
- At the language level, there is support for asynchronous operations that exist in Python and JS ES6-this makes it easier to work with asynchronous and multithreaded operations compared to Java.
- Kotlin Multiplatform-the ability to compile programs in Kotlin simultaneously for JVM, JS, Native (C/C++, Object C) – allows for reduced code duplication, easier integration with frontends, and more optimal development in the Serverless architecture.
- Domain Specific Language (DSL) – provides a compact and easy-to-read replacement for builders.
- Kotlin is not an academic language that was invented in the scientific community for specific tasks. This is an industrial language created by developers specifically for developing Android apps.
- Conciseness of the language. Kotlin is very similar to Swift. Swift is a very concise language with the ideology that code reads like text in English.
- It is open source, so you can easily identify the problem if it occurs, and report it to the language developers.
These are not the only benefits of Kotlin. Even so, these benefits should be more than enough to convince you to use Kotlin in your business or to give it a try to your engineers.
