Weekend resources for new Kotlin programmers

Over the years, JetBrains have released a number of nice development tools. Many of you from the .NET world live and die by ReSharper, the add-on that supercharges Visual Studio and takes a lot of drudgery and donkey-work out of .NET development. If you’re a Java developer tired of the nightmare of self-flagellation that is Eclipse, you probably use IntelliJ IDEA, which is a far nice environment to work in. And if you’re building Android apps, you probably are still giving thanks for Android Studio, which was built on IntelliJ.

Six years ago, JetBrains embarked on a project to build a new programming language named Kotlin after an island near St. Petersburg, Russia, where one of their development teams is based. On February 15, 2016, JetBrains announced the 1.0 release of Kotlin, which in their own words, “works everywhere where Java works”:

• IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio and Eclipse
• Maven, Gradle and Ant
• Spring Boot (Kotlin support released today!)
• GitHub, Slack and even Minecraft

You can try out Kotlin online or on your own development environment:

• IntelliJ IDEA (Ultimate or Community): just create a Kotlin project or a Kotlin file in a Java project
• Android Studio: install the plugin through Plugin Manager
• Eclipse: install the plugin through Marketplace

...then download its documentation from the official site, after which you should check out these perfect-for-weekend-enjoyment resources...

First, a little reading material

Start with Mike Hearn’s essay on Medium, Why Kotlin is my next programming language. It lays out a pretty complete list of reasons why you’d want to take up development with Kotlin. If you’re convinced by the end of the essay, continue with the videos below...

The Fragmented podcast on Kotlin

If you’re going for a walk, run, bike ride, or to the gym, and you’d like to find out more about Kotlin, check out the October 2015 edition of the Android-centric Fragmented podcast in which hosts Donn Felker and Kaushik Gopal talk about Kotlin with Hadi Hariri, JetBrain’s developer advocacy lead. This one’s pretty in depth and runs 1 hour and 25 minutes.

Fun with Kotlin

Eder Bastos, and Android developer at Raizlabs, takes under 8 minutes to provide a nice tour of the Kotlin programming language and why you should consider it for your next Android project. This was published January 14, 2016:

Kotlin: New Hope in a Java 6 Wasteland

Michael Pardo gave a Kotlin talk at Droidcon NYC 2015 on August 27, 2015:

Kotlin: The Swift of Android

Here’s Svetlana Isakova of JetBrains (creator of Kotlin, Android Studio, ReSharper and a whole lot of IDEs) at DroidCon Berlin on June 4, 2015:

Android Development with Kotlin

Presented by Jake Wharton at the AndroidKW Meetup in Waterloo, Canada, December 3, 2015:

You may also want to take a look at these other Android/Kotlin presentations by Jake Wharton:

• Advancing Android Development with Kotlin GDG DevFest (Dublin, Ireland, November 7, 2015)
• Advancing Android Development with the Kotlin Language Øredev (Malmö, Sweden, November 6, 2015)

Functional Programming with Kotlin

Here’s a talk by Mike Hearn (the same Mike Hearn who wrote Why Kotlin is my next programminglanguage) where he shows Kotlin in action, with an emphasis on functional programming. This one was posted November 5, 2015, and he’s demonstrating using a pre-1.0-beta version: