

These surface-level similarities help over time to establish a cornerstone for exploration, and they can lead to a more idiomatic codebase.īeyond syntax, Kotlin provides language features that aren’t available to legacy devices in Android. Kotlin reads much more like Java than Clojure ever could, and to iOS developers, it reads much more closely to Swift. The promise of a language like Clojure was to bring a “general-purpose language…where Java is suitable.” In practice, the issue with this claim is the built-in knowledge of C-like languages around Java codebases. Kotlin Is a Bridge to Functional Programming


Google has remedied this in part by releasing Java 8 language features in Android Studio 3, but the move doesn’t go far enough for developers who want more advanced features like Functional Interfaces or Java Streams. While JVM versions have been upgraded in recent versions of Android, older Android devices will always be left out. This fact is clear from the moment one jumps into Android Studio, but it’s worth mentioning either way. If you’re thinking about trying it as an alternative to Java in Android, here are a few things to consider: Java 8 Still Isn’t Available on Android Kotlin received a big endorsement in May 2017, when Google announced official support for the language on Android. Now there’s Kotlin, which is here to make mobile development easier on Android, and to end the mutation and Null Pointer Exceptions of the past. Other contenders like Clojure and Scala have come before to make the JVM more friendly, but they have fallen short of widespread usage. Even on the Android framework, Java is a verbose language. Android is a popular mobile platform, but it lacks some of the basic language features in Java that iOS has with Swift.
