Kotlin is a modern, statically typed programming language that combines concepts from object-oriented and functional programming. The final breakthrough, at least in Android development, came in 2019 when Google declared Android development “Kotlin-first” at Google I/O. Kotlin has been under development since 2010, but only gained some popularity in 2016 with version 1.0. There are also plug-ins for Eclipse and NetBeans. JetBrains also distributes the well-known IDE IntelliJ IDEA, which has good support for Kotlin.

Kotlin is developed as open source software by JetBrains under the Apache 2.0 license. I will focus on what I consider to be the most important features of Kotlin: functions, variables, null safety, object-oriented programming, functional programming, and interoperability with Java. This article assumes that you already “speak” Java, and shows some interesting Kotlin features from this point of view.

However, I think it’s fine to think outside the box more often and look at newer languages on the JVM. My daily work revolves around backend development on the JVM, mainly in Java. First off: I am not a Kotlin fanboy and I think Java is a very successful programming language.

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