It’s rare when a highly structured language with fairly strict syntax sparks emotions of joy and delight. But Kotlin, which is statically typed and compiled like other less friendly languages, delivers a developer experience that thousands of mobile and web programmers are falling in love with.
The designers of Kotlin, who have years of experience with developer tooling (IntelliJ and other IDEs), created a language with very specific developer-oriented requirements. They wanted a modern syntax, fast compile times, and advanced concurrency constructs while taking advantage of the robust performance and reliability of the JVM. The result, Kotlin 1.0, was released in February 2016 and its...