Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmoaad | Hacker News Reader

I might go against the grain here, but if I've had nothing but pure bliss working in Java.

If you're just starting out, Head First Java is the way to go. Then expand your knowledge, look at things like Lombok, or go for one of the languages built on the JVM (Kotlin/Scala). Want insane performance out of the box? Look at Vert.X. There's a library for everything as the language has been around since '95.

View on HN

I'm actually thinking about Kotlin. What is your experience with it? Is it good?

Kotlin is fantastic. As a JVM language with excellent interoperability with Java you basically get all the benefits of Java. Its syntax is succinct and expressive, and it has great features which are not available in Java, such as nullable types, coroutines, extension functions and much more.

If Kotlin interests you, I've heard great things on Scala as well (but don't have first hand experience with it so I can't elaborate).

Agreed on all points here, especially the interoperability which brings the benefit of being able to use the massive amount of Java libraries.

Introspectively, I found that I could achieve a large portion of the Kotlin features with Java8+JavaRX+Lombok but I could see a very strong argument for "Why do I have to learn 3 technologies when I can get everything for free with Kotlin".

Additionally, Kotlin is highly recommended from the folks at Google with regards to Android.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com