5 Intriguing Reasons To Learn Kotlin Programming [Infographic]

Kotlin is a programming language created by JetBrains for modern multi-platform applications. It is free, safe, concise and interoperable with Java and Android. During recent Google I/O 2017, it was announced an official language for Android apps development.

Kotlin is on the rise and, here are 5 reasons why you should learn Kotlin programming:

1. Feature Rich

There are a lot of features that makes learning and writing Kotlin code fun:

Concise – Using Kotlin instead of Java reduce lines of code by approximately 40%.
Safe – It avoids errors such as null exceptions which is a big headache in Java. Also, it’s easier to debug Kotlin code.
Tool-friendly – JetBrains, the company behind Kotlin, is renowned for creating tools for developers. No wonder, it is developer friendly.
Free – It is free and distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0.

2. 100% Interoperable With Java And Android

Whatever you do in Java, you can do it in Kotlin in fewer lines of code.

If you have already developed Android/Java application, you can convert some sections of Java code to Kotlin, and your application works perfectly like before.

In fact, the Kotlin plugin that comes with the latest version of Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA (also available in Eclipse) can convert your Java code to Kotlin in few clicks. Though the plugin may not generate the cleanest code, it creates workable Kotlin code.

Companies like Trello, Coursera, Uber, Netflix etc. has already started using Kotlin on their applications.

3. Increases Productivity

One of the reasons Kotlin was created was to increase their (JetBrains) own productivity.

Back in early 2010’s, IntelliJ-based IDEs (IDE for Java created by JetBrains) was written almost entirely in Java, which took a lot of time to compile. So, they created Kotlin.

Kotlin is expressive and allows you to reduce the number of lines of significantly. In addition to that, testing Kotlin code is much easier because it’s type safe and eliminates the issue of null references from your code.

4. Kotlin Is On The Rise

About 160,000 users tried something about Kotlin, and the number of lines of Kotlin code on Github increased from about 2 million to 10 million in a year from 2016 to 2017.

This is the data before Google’s big announcement.

Kotlin was announced an official language for Android development in recent Google I/O held on May 2017. Here’s the graph of Google trend after this announcement.

5. JetBrains Has Big Plans For The Future Of Kotlin

JetBrains has some great plans for Kotlin. The language is already 100% interoperable with Java/Android and compiles some JavaScript virtual machines. Now, they are working on Kotlin/Native which compiles native code directly, which is a great step towards making Kotlin a language of creating a modern multi-platform application.

They are also working on the concept of common modules. This allows developers to create multiplatform applications by writing a platform specific Kotlin code. Here are some projects that may be possible in near future:

Cross-platform mobile apps (iOS and Android app both written in Kotlin)
Server-side and micro services
Data analysis and machine learning

Kotlin programming is a language with a lot of possibilities. It is still new, however, with Google’s announcement, it’s safe to say the future of Kotlin is bright.

Not sure where to start with Kotlin, Visit: Learn Kotlin – Tutorial for Beginners. It’s a comprehensive guide explaining “Why to learn it?”, “How to get started in Kotlin?”, and “How you can learn it?”

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