Kotlin (programming language)

Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Its primary development is from a team of JetBrains programmers based in St. Petersburg, Russia (the name comes from the Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg).^[1] Kotlin was named Language of the Month in the January 2012 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.^[2] While not syntax compatible with Java, Kotlin is designed to interoperate with Java code and is reliant on Java code from the existing Java Class Library, such as the Collections Framework.

History

In July 2011 JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, which had been under development for a year, a new language for the JVM.^[3] JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages did not have the features they were looking for, with the exception of Scala. However, he cited the slow compile time of Scala as an obvious deficiency.^[3] One of the stated goals of Kotlin is to compile as fast as Java. In February 2012, JetBrains open sourced the project under the Apache 2 license.^[4]

Philosopy

Development lead Andrey Breslav has said that Kotlin is designed to be an industrial strength object-oriented language, be a better language than Java but still be fully interoperable with Java code, allowing companies to make a gradual migration from Java to Kotlin.^[5]

Semantics

Like Pascal and Scala, Kotlin variable declarations and parameter lists have the data type come after the variable name (and with a colon separator), unlike C and its derivatives such as C++, Java, C#, and D.

Hello, world! example

package hello
 
fun main(args : Array<String>) {
  println("Hello, world!")
}

References

External links

• Official website