Kotlin

I bumped into an old work-colleague, someone who I respect as a great programmer, a JVM nut, and he’s raving about Kotlin and type inference.

Type inference is the autodetection of an expression type in a programming language. I haven’t spent any time looking at this, I’m no longer in love with the jvm, but apparently type inference == less typing.

A strange benefit in a world where ide’s live or die on their autocompletion capabilities.

I’m not convinced that brevity is a key factor in productivity (though I do value languages with a limited keyword set). If that was the case, code everywhere would be littered with ternary operators. Instead, developers gravitate towards a particular style in development some more succinct than others.

I guess the key is not to sacrifice comprehension in the pursuit of brevity. I’m probably, over-analysing my zealot colleague. For jvm users it maybe the godsend that they crave, for me I’m happy tinkering at go and no longer worrying about slow start-up, memory hogging and horrific build times