Kotlin Night in London on October 12th, 2016

Kotlin is a programming language invented by JetBrains that simplifies and even beautifies programming for Java Virtual Machine. Although syntactically it differs from Java, it provides full access to existing Java libraries.

Practically it's a wrapper around Java programming language that behind the scenes generates some boilerplate code that simply became too time-consuming to keep taking care of again and again and again... As a result, the code becomes more readable even for those Java programmers who is not really familiar with Kotlin yet. Look for more details about it on JetBrain's website.

Kotlin Night in London, Real World Kotlin, was quite interesting, informative and even surprising. The venue was almost full, some presentations were done by those practitioners who actively use Kotlin in their day work for production code already.

Takeaway points are:

1. Kotlin combines object-oriented and functional programming styles in a way when coding efficiency is the must. In other words, it was built by practitioners for practitioners.
2. Kotlin is free, it really costs nothing to start using it.
3. It does not generate any new kind of binaries. Kotlin code is translated to Java and then compiled into normal Java binaries.
4. Kotlin code looks way cleaner than Java, it's easy to read and understand what it does.
5. JetBrains seems to be a pretty decent and reliable vendor to be behind things like that.
6. If a Java programmer is familiar with some functional programming then it would be very easy for him/ her to pick up Kotlin in no time at all.
7. If I'm to start a new Java project, I'll definitely give it a go.

Recording of presentations from that night could be found here.