Should Kotlin Be Your Go-To Language? • Garth Gilmour, Eamonn Boyle & Preben Thorø

Kotlin is the future of programming, offering a modern language experience with a good ecosystem, community, and libraries, while mitigating industry churn and providing improved autocomplete and refactoring capabilities.

Key takeaways
  • The speaker has been programming since he was a kid, starting with a Spectrum 48K, and has experience with various languages, including C++, Java, and C#.
  • He has been specializing in Kotlin for the last few years and thinks it’s the future of programming.
  • The ecosystem of Kotlin is good, with a community and libraries that make it easy to develop with.
  • The speaker prefers statically typed systems, such as Kotlin, which allow for better autocomplete and refactoring.
  • He likes that Kotlin is a modern language that is designed for modern development.
  • There is a lot of churn in the industry, especially in front-end development, and the speaker thinks that Kotlin helps to mitigate this.
  • The speaker believes that development has never been as good as it is now, and that Kotlin is a good choice for many use cases.
  • He thinks that the confluence of different language features is creating a “sweet spot” that everyone is heading towards.
  • The speaker has nostalgia for the past, but believes that Kotlin is a significant improvement over earlier languages.
  • He thinks that some developers are put off by the complexity of algorithms, but that modern languages like Kotlin can help to simplify things.
  • The speaker likes that Kotlin allows for more expressive code and has enjoyed using it to develop applications.