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by cies
1353 days ago
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> Is Kotlin the only other language they know? On the JVM: I'd say yes. Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby, and what not came and went. I'd say Clojure is the third, and it take a nice place in the design space. But Kotlin to me is so close to Java that it is basically Java 2.0: the Java that Java cannot be due to intended organizational slowness. > Python is one of Java's main competitors, and when it comes to teaching a first language it is the main competitor. Yes it probably is. The changes outlines in the article are not going to help here I'm afraid. But I'm weird. I'd say the best lang without static typing for noobs is a LISP (so that every student is likely equally confused). When learning a language with types go for Rust or Idris. All not exactly competitors of Java :) |
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When Java was created in the '90s, James Gosling said that it is intended to be a slow-evolving conservative language that will only pick features from other languages once they have been sufficiently proven to be worth it. We try to live up to that goal and be a last-mover. It's not organisational slowness but conservatism in design that has worked very well for Java. Java will never adopt many if not most of the features Kotlin has, because most features never prove themselves as particularly beneficial over time, and because we try to make the language as minimal as possible, because it's intended for a very wide audience, and, in general, most programmers prefer languages with fewer features to languages with more features.
I'd say Kotlin was Java 2.0 ten to five years ago, but now it's a language that's going in a different direction from Java's.
> The changes outlines in the article are not going to help here I'm afraid.
Not alone, but this is just the beginning.