[Tainnor]

Kotlin doesn't get enough love. It gets derided by some Java developers for being too cutesy and sugary and it's not talked much about by the kinds of people who love to talk about Haskell, Lisp or Rust (no shade to these languages), but to me it's the most pragmatic language I've used so far.

[dkarl]

Speaking as a lover of Scala who has seen Scala codebases go wrong in the cliché ways, Kotlin would be the first language I would consider if I were starting a new commercial software codebase today. Kotlin seems to have enough of the pragmatic elegance of Scala to get the job done with clarity and accuracy, without the curse of attracting the compulsive intellectual thrill-seekers that will ruin your Scala team if you accidentally hire one.

[nobleach]

Compulsive intellectual thrill-seekers... while I never want to call names, this does seem to explain the phenomena quite well. There are just some people out there that need the world to know how smart they are.

Anecdotal: I do know one guy however who's just so ecstatic every time he figures new things out. To his way of thinking, everything that comes with "functional" truly is simpler. He built a dependency injector based on a Reader. He built a cool Result library where he managed to get at the internals of the JVM. Never once did he come off as holier than thou. I can appreciate and respect that.

[dkarl]

IMO "compulsive" is the damning word there. People who don't enjoy learning typically don't make good programmers, but you have to show respect for your coworkers when you choose your learning opportunities.

[xwowsersx]

This is exactly how I feel, having written tons of Scala, some Haskell and a multitude of other languages. It's why I recently decided to build most new, large projects with Kotlin at $job

[LinXitoW]

I really liked Kotlin in the beginning, but it's error handling story is non-existent. They removed the ONLY decent (not great, very flawed) complier validated method for error handling, checked exceptions, and gave us nothing in return.

It'd be so easy to simply do exactly what Rust does. Kotlin already has the ADT stuff necessary, all we need is some kind of "bubbling" operator, like the ? in Rust. Because right now, it's all just super horrible manual checks everywhere.

[Tainnor]

Different strokes... I think Java checked exceptions are a design flaw and the fact that no other language that I'm aware of has them is telling. Maybe it even was a good idea in the beginning, but it was just horribly abused by basically every library under the sun - no, I don't want to catch some low-level exception when I'm calling your library, thank you very much.

I don't mind making error handling part of compile-time checking (as long as you can opt out by something like unchecked exceptions), but that should be done in a way that is compatible with the regular type system. That way you can abstract over error handling in ways that using checked exceptions disallows.

IIRC, the stance of the Kotlin team is that if you want compile-time checked error handling, you should use Result types. Maybe the ergonomics aren't as good as in Rust, but if you use something like arrow, they're still decent.

[paulddraper]

> Kotlin doesn't get enough love.

Really???

It's probably the #1 language for new Android projects.

[xwowsersx]

I presume they meant outside of Android development.

[Tainnor]

Yes. Many people say that Kotlin is only for Android but that's totally untrue.

[AtlasBarfed]

Have you ever used groovy re: pragmatic language?

I've tried a bit of Kotlin, but still prefer Groovy by a lot.