Kotlin Killer Features for Programmers and Software Engineers

I’ve started using Kotlin 2 years ago, and I immediately fell in love with this language. This article presents the point of view of a software engineer on this language, i.e. the point of view of someone who does not only want to write code easily, but who wants to write code which is readable, reusable, portable, and safe.

For those who don’t know Kotlin, it’s a language developed by Jetbrains (known for their IDE, Intellij IDEA). It has been designed to replace Java. It’s more concise, more elegant, safer, and it’s running on the JVM, making it totally compatible with existing Java libraries (and even more). But to replace the widely used Java, a new language must have really good arguments to show.

Kotlin is rising while Java’s popularity is decreasing, yet Kotlin’s popularity is still far from Java’s

Here, I’ll try to sum up these arguments, explaining why, in my opinion, software developers should begin migrating from Java to Kotlin. To start with, I’ll write the 5 first points which explains why Kotlin is a better Java than Java. In the second part, the 5 following points will explain why it‘ i’s just a good language on its own and why you should try it.

Type inference

Type inference is the ability to write code without specifying the type of the variables, if the type can be deduced without any ambiguity from the current context.