Introduction

About Kotlin

You can tell that programming languages fascinate me. As a language enthusiast, I code in about fifteen different languages and have written books on a few of them. I love languages, all of them.

Learning a language is like visiting a city. You come across new things but you also see things that are common. What’s familiar brings comfort and the differences intrigue. To succeed in learning a language we need a good balance of the two.

Several of us aspire to be polyglot programmers. Kotlin is in itself a polyglot language. It brings together the powerful capabilities from many different languages. The creators of Kotlin took the good parts from various languages and combined them into one highly approachable and pragmatic language.

When I started learning Kotlin my mind was on fire, seeing the features I’ve enjoyed in different languages such as Java, Groovy, Scala, C++, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Erlang, Haskell… At the same time, there are so many nuances in Kotlin that made me so much more productive in programming than any one of those languages.

Some languages tell you how you should write code. Kotlin isn’t one of those. With Kotlin, you decide which paradigm works best for the application at hand. For example, you may find that the imperative style is better in a large application because you have to deal with inherent side effects and exceptions, and Kotlin makes it easy to program in that style. But, in another part of the application, you may need to deal with big data transformations, so you decide the functional style is better for that, and Kotlin will transform into a charming functional programming language instantaneously. When you write object-oriented code, you’ll see that the compiler works for you instead of you working for the compiler.

You’ll see my excitement for the language throughout this course. It’s been fun learning and applying Kotlin. I hope this course will make your journey to learn the language an enjoyable one. Thank you for picking it up.

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In the next lesson, you will find out who this course is intended for.