Why I love Kotlin

At avisec we decided to use Kotlin when we started to rewrite our backend service. This has proven to be a very good decision. Here are my top 10 reasons why I do love Kotlin:

  1. Data classes eliminate a lot of boilerplate code.
  2. The nullability support of the compiler forces you to think about nulls everywhere. This reduces the number of NullpointerException related bugs to a minimum.
  3. The lambda syntax is very, very lean.
  4. No more guessing which functional Java interface to use.
  5. The standard library provides is a great help.
  6. The IntelliJ support is seamless.
  7. Java and Kotlin integrate both ways – you can start writing Kotlin code in Java projects today, no big deal.
  8. Return values are supported for most (?) structures: if, try/catch, when
  9. Assign default values to parameters and used named parameters when calling functions.
  10. Generics in Kotlin are more powerful than in Java.

Let’s hope the current adoption rate of Kotlin continues and it will become a widely used alternative for Java on the JVM.