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by anad7
2953 days ago
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I've said it earlier, I am saying it again. "Kotlin enthusiasts or rather PR representatives cannot stomach criticism", this is quite visible on the blog itself and here on HNews. Consult with your CEO, CTO and/or Director of Engineering before switching to Kotlin, there may be things you might not be aware of, think 20 years ahead and think objectively about the pros/cons before heeding to advice of the enthusiasts, they won't be there to help you when your app behaves unexpectedly, or if your tech debt increases or when you are unable to find people willing to work with your messed up code base, remember there's no reverse Kotlin to Java converter built into IntelliJ. My advice is to sit it out and wait for Java to evolve, which shouldn't be far away, in the meanwhile enjoy writing your code in Java in which you have your actual work experience(8+ years in my case), which has books and resources dedicated to help you understand the pitfalls, design patterns and every trick out there since 22+ years of its existence. Besides I would recommend developers to not waste their time on a language which piggy backs on JVM, many other languages which did that or are doing it have failed, Kotlin won't be an exception. Instead use Java to learn and write complicated Data Structures and Algorithms and learn technologies like Machine Learning, Neural Networks and AI etc to increase your job prospects. |
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Now back to this blog post and enthusiastic defence of Kotlin:
This blog post wasn't a criticism, it was instead under-informed and misleading. You will indeed attract the attention of enthusiasts if you take an authoratative viewpoint against the thing those enthusiasts care about, publish it publically, promote it to the whole community, and use bad (or no) evidence in the process. Who wouldn't stand up and protect something they care about in that circumstance?
By the way, when we were helping to create Java at Borland, we were told many things like you just said: "it will fail", "the CEO/CTO/CIO won't want it", "we can't take the risk", "in 20 years it will be gone", "it's just a toy and not for the enterprise", "dancing Duke is all it can do", "it will fail like the others, Java is no exception", "no real application will be written in it", "it can't do server-side", "stick with C++", "stick with Delphi", "stick with VBA", "stick with PHP"
So obviously the prognosticators and non-enthusiasts were wrong. What makes you better are reading the future than they were? Is Google wrong when backing Kotlin? Is JetBrains? Is Square? Is the Spring Team? Is the Gradle team? Is the JUNIT team? Or are these some of the same people who made the right call on Java way back in 1995-2000 as well? In fact Java would have failed had the enthusiasts not carried it through tough times, shaped it up, improved performance, fixed critical bugs, cleaned up bad specifications, and showcased it to the world. Because of enthusiasts, you have Java.
So let the enthusiasts do their work of defending a good thing against people that just don't yet see the light (or maybe never will care to, so bet it).