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A developer shares insights and reflections gained from 700 hours of hands-on experience with Kotlin, starting from 2020-2021. The post discusses lessons learned while working on Kray and other projects, offering perspective on the language from extensive practical use.

What I Learned from 700 Hours of Kotlin

News and articles related to Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform

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What I learned from 700 Hours of Kotlin

What I learned from 700 Hours of Kotlin

nice article and agree on all you have said. One detail I would add is that JB’s main focus is mobile and backend dev. everything else is low priority. I have also tried K/N but for me it was pain and suffering.
The best DX was in Android, almost no issues or bugs here. Second best DX was in KMP, which was surprising and including the support. I would find a bug, report it and the same day they told me about workaround or it was in progress and fixed in 1-2 days.
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maybe we’ll see it beat even Python one day
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That is my dream 🚀

Nice article! As a React dev, I really liked the expressiveness in Kotlin. The type system is really robust. Coroutines are also really good.
I don’t like the dependency on Gradle; the setup is complicated and it’s really slow. I feel the compile time could be better too.
I’m learning a little bit of Go, and your mention about the feeling of using this language is the same for me, but on the other hand, the tools are so well integrated.
I hope that Amper could be successful and fill this missing gap (at least for me) in Kotlin.

700 hours is a great milestone, but it’s exactly the point where the ‘honeymoon phase’ with Kotlin ends and you start missing the raw control of other stacks. Kotlin is beautiful, but the more you use it for JVM/Native, the more you realize that the ‘syntactic sugar’ sometimes hides performance bottlenecks that are a nightmare to debug.
Do you feel that Kotlin is actually the future of backend, or is it just staying alive because of the Android ecosystem? Because every time I see a ‘Kotlin Multiplatform’ project, I can’t help but think we are just trying to reinvent the wheel instead of just using Rust or Go where it makes sense.

I’m a total beginner, first of all, so my impressions are biased towards that. I learn a bit of Java like 8 years ago (I’m 28) making graphs with the growth of fungi or making a Pac-Man exit a maze. Simple things. The harder thing was to read and write formatted text I remember. Now, nearly a decade have passed and after some health issues I decided to learn programming again and do simulations and stuff (I’m a physicist and I’m a high school teacher so I’m also thinking about didactic simulations), and I thought about kotlin since it ended up with the boilerplate and verbosity of Java. But I have to say that one of the things it lacks is a good beginner experience. I think it would be nice to have real total beginner books and things, things up to date and with quality. I didn’t encounter things like that that were up to date so I changed my mind and I’m thinking about other programming languages. Also that thing about the experience outside intelliJ… So true. And even the experience of the ide without paying… You don’t have access to the spring plugins, for example. I think that’s quite bad. But I also see the potential of such a language and I hope it grows and like you said, dethrone Python