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Discussion on: Kotlin - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Leonardo Teteo

When I heard about Kotlin for the first time I heard that it was a language full of features that solved many of Java problems: verbosity, NPE, etc. People also said that it was a smooth learning curve for any Java developer, I thought it was nice and since the learning curve was smooth, maybe I could do what I liked to do more: jump into a language with examples and all that. It was not a very good experience...
It was some months ago, so some things may have changed and my memory can fail, but the first example I jump into was Spring Boot, since I use it every day in Java and it is already concise and easy to use, so even more concise would just make me love it more, right?
I created the project and started to write, reading the documentation when needed, but when I finished writing the Hello World example... Errors appeared...
More recent examples don't have this anymore, but at that time it was necessary to use a companion object to start the Spring Boot application, it was hard to find out that, and then there is lateinit for autowired properties, compatibility between Java libraries and Kotlin which made the use of my favorite libraries very troublesome. I remember a had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to use Jackson. lol
Yeah, it was not smooth at all... I'm returning now since there are examples of projects in Kotlin in the book I'm reading. I think I will give it another chance.