[jillesvangurp]

Recently getting into kotlin and to a lesser extent Rust; also from a Java background. First of all, there's more to learning a language than understanding the syntax. That you can accomplish in a few hours, depending on your understanding of the underlying concepts. But from there to grasping new idioms specific to a language and generally being productive takes a lot longer.

You have to engage with it for longer time and be forced to solve all the day to day problems you are going to have. So, learn by doing that. Just pick any modestly scoped project you are interested in doing and start doing it. Start with something not critical but still interesting enough that it is worth doing. I tend to avoid completely academic stuff. Then build on that.

In my case, I've been converting Java code to Kotlin for a few weeks now and am getting to the point where I'm comfortable with the language. Kotlin is of course the easy thing to pick up if you are doing Java since it is designed to be easy to make the switch. So definitely would recommend doing that provided your team is OK with that. It starts paying off pretty early in terms of reduced complexity and verbosity and extra type safety.

Rust is a bit harder but the only way to learn is by doing. I've been taking baby-steps there but it looks worth my time. There I've been reimplementing some OSS stuff I did years ago with an eye to reviving those projects. Progress is more slow because it is too academic. But rust has a lot of new idioms for me to wrap my head around before I can use it professionally so slow is not necessarily bad.

[kthartic]

@OP Just to give a bit of motivation for learning Kotlin - it's now the official language on Android. Not sure if Android is of interest to you, but either way at least you know it's in wide use and clearly a powerful language.

[dorfsmay]

THE official language? Or an official language?

Isn't Java still the primary official language on Android?