Kotlin 1.0 Released: Pragmatic Language for JVM and Android
I&#x27;ve been using Kotlin for work (I&#x27;m a PhD student, so work is to be understood in a peculiar fashion) and I&#x27;m really liking it.<p>It&#x27;s a much needed upgrade to Java whose fundamental advantage is what I&#x27;d call &quot;crispness&quot;: you can write terse code that is actually understandable. In particular, the notion of inlining closures allows for efficient functional programming and great DSLs.<p>In comparison to Scala, Kotlin is much less advanced, but much much simpler. Like said earlier, it&#x27;s easily as terse as Scala. Scala, however, is much more expressive (what I&#x27;d give for typeclasses...) and that sometimes hurts in Kotlin as it does in Java.<p>There&#x27;s also Ceylon (JVM language by Red Hat) who is seemingly in the same niche and which I very much wants to experiment with. From what I&#x27;ve read so far, Ceylon seems conceptually more elegant and more powerful than Kotlin. The open question is whether it can match Kotlin&#x27;s crispness.<p>It feels a bit early for a release however. The compiler is still completely wonky. Inference sometimes fails on things that should be completely trivial. It is particularly bad at taking return types into account. It&#x27;s fully usable, but expect to work your way about some linguistic unpleasantness (or outright bugs).<p>Also, for some reason, Kotlin seems big in Japan.