A Productive and Pragmatic Language A programming language is usually designed with a specific purpose in mind. This purpose can be anything from serving a specific environment (e.g, the web) to a certain paradigm (e.g. functional programming). In the case of Kotlin the goal is to build a productive and pragmatic language, that has all the features that a developer needs and makes easy to use them. Kotlin was initially designed to work with other JVM languages, but it is now evolved to be much more: it also works in the browser and as a native application. This is what Dmitry Jemerov, developm ..read more

There are two kinds of innovation: new perspectives that changes how we look at things and pragmatic improvements that changes how we do things. Kotlin is full of these pragmatic improvements, getting its user a language that just feel good to use. One of the most useful improvement, especially if you come from Java, is the when construct. A traditional switch is basically just a statement that can substitute a series of simple if/else that make basic checks. However it cannot replace all sort of if/else sequences but just those which compare a value with some constant. So, you can only use a ..read more

This article will walk you through how to develop web applications in Kotlin using Javalin. Javalin and Kotlin work well together, as they are both very pragmatic and focus on getting things done quickly and with a small amount of code. We will start with a simple “Hello World” example, then look at server configuration, application structure, and finally deployment. The code examples in this article are available on GitHub. Hello World To create a simple server which responds with Hello World for a GET request to /, we need two lines of Javalin. One line to ..read more

This article is paired with a companion repository. Get your free code while it is fresh. Why WebAssembly is Relevant? For a long answer to this question read our introduction on WebAssembly: Why should you care? The short answer is that WebAssembly can permit to compile seriously complex application into an efficient binary format, that can be run in web browsers with good performance. So far we had just JavaScript, now we have an assembly for the web and we can compile all sort of languages to WebAssembly (WASM for its friends). Think of C, C++, Rust, and… Kotlin, obviously. All compila ..read more

The KotlinConf 2017 was on 2-3 november and it was a great conference. In this article we are going to present a short summary of the talks with links to their videos. List of Talks Understanding Kotlin Understand Every Line of Your Codebase Introduction to Coroutines Deep Dives into Coroutines on JVM Idiomatic Interop Kotlin Puzzlers The Cost of Kotlin Language Features You Can, but Should You? Deep Dive into Kotlin/Native Kotlin Types: Exposed Android & Web Frontend Kotlin from the Trenches A View State Machine for Network Calls on Android Real World Kotlin-Powered Android Isomorphi ..read more

Problem Solution Simplify Callbacks Coroutines Get results from a potentially infinite list BuildSequence Get a promise for a future result Async/Await Work with streams of data Channels and Pipelines Act on multiple asynchronous inputs Select The purpose of coroutines is to take care of the complications in working with asynchronous programming. You write code sequentially, like you usually do, and then leave to the coroutines the hard work. Coroutines are a low-level mechanism. The end objective is to build  accessible mechanisms like async/await in C# Coroutines are a ..read more

I attended KotlinConf to give a presentation about Building Languages using Kotlin. It was an amazing experience. The organization was great, and the whole experience increased my enthusiasm towards Kotlin: I thought it was not possible and I was proved wrong. It was very nice to meet not only other Kotlin enthusiasts but also a lot of developers from JetBrains. I am in awe of what that company is doing with Kotlin, with their IDEs and with Jetbrains MPS. While you can read online statistics about growing Kotlin adoption is very different to meet people from top companies, coming from all arou ..read more

Switching to a new primary language can be daunting. We know the ins and outs of the language we have been working with for years, and all the sudden we’re newbies again. While this is always a good exercise to put yourself in, and comes with lots of learning, there is also a bit of vulnerability. If your primary language has been Java, and you’re making the switch to Kotlin, you might be feeling a bit of this insecurity. You’re in luck in this case. The knowledge you have of Java is in no way obsolete. Kotlin is a language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, with the same bytecode that is ..read more

This is a review of the book Kotlin For Android Developers* by Antonio Leiva, an Android Engineer working for an international company. When you have to pick an educational book the first thing you have to understand is: what kind of book is whose the book is for When it comes to books aimed to teach a new programming language they can roughly divided in two groups: theoretical and pragmatic ones. A theoretical book can be a 1000+ page book that teach all the aspects of the language, from the platform to each construct, usually in a logic order of ascending difficulty. Instead a pragmatic bo ..read more

You have seen the benefits Kotlin can bring to you, however you have to learn Kotlin. You can do learn it on your own, pick a book or get access to a course. The problem is to you have to figure out which course is best for you: we have reviewed the most relevant ones and in this article we are going to give you the information you need to pick the course that is right for you. If none of this course is what you are looking for you can still look into our list of 100+ Resources To Learn Kotlin The Right Way. What you will find in this article? First of all you will find the review of the ..read more