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by The_Colonel 2226 days ago
It has the benefit of 15 years more hindsight.

As an example, during this time the development community figured out that using immutability as the default brings benefits.

Kotlin is designed with this in mind, but C# isn't - e.g. C# has this cool feature for object initialization which is so handy and all developers use it. Except for - it doesn't work with immutable classes (the ones with readonly fields). As an effect developers dislike to use immutable classes since it's not ergonomic in C# and instead use standard POCO.

Another example is that C# still in this age does not support readonly parameters and local variables (which even Java and JavaScript (!) support). In Kotlin "readonly" local variables is the idiomatic code practice which doesn't make code any more verbose. And in the case they decide to add it to C#, it will have to be at the cost of verbosity (similarly to how Java does it) because of backwards compatibility.

1 comments

> Except for - it doesn't work with immutable classes (the ones with readonly fields).

Well good thing they're adding that in C# 9 then

Oh, cool, I didn't notice that!

Still, they are playing catch-up here.

I mean... if you go that route then I would say Kotlin isn't really ready to be used as a production language in most places due to the severe lack of tooling, especially when it comes to things like static analysis. Sure ktlint is there, but the rules library is lacking.

So from that perspective, Kotlin is playing catch-up.

Static analysis is the only weak point of kotlin that I'm aware of.. Intellij Idea has by default something that might be considered as static analysis.

There is also detekt but it's true it is inferior to solution that Java has. https://github.com/detekt/detekt

PMD is targeting kotlin initial support for their next major release https://github.com/pmd/pmd/issues/419

I've answered a jetbrains survey recently and they revealed they are working on a new product that would be a full fledged static analyser, maybe this would solve the issue?

Discussion was about the design of the language only.