I wanted to learn how to make an android app and it seems to be pushing to use Kotlin (official tutorial). I thought I was going to use Java (that I know). So I’m a little lost.
Is it really better with Kotlin than Java? Is it a good investment to learn Kotlin?
I just want to be able to make android app for myself and maybe it could drive me somewhere at some point professionnally. I have a web dev formation.
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Just go ahead with the tutorial. Kotlin is basically identical to Java with only tiny changes, and you can just look those up whenever you see something new.
Nice, if it’s not too much changes then I shouldn’t be very lost.
The above is pretty misleading. A typical Java program can be made into a Kotlin program with little changes, this is true. But Kotlin code, particularly when written using Kotlin best practices, bares very little resemblance to Java code. If you learn Kotlin first, you’ll find some of that knowledge does transfer to Java but then there’s plenty that won’t and you’ll have to learn the Java way of doing things too. Still, as a dev, knowing more languages never hurts. I’d still recommend proceeding with Kotlin.
It’s perfectly fine to continue to write Android apps in Java, doing that will continue to be supported for all foreseeable future and I do it myself for a hobby app that I maintain.
That said, there are good reasons for the increasing popularity of Kotlin, it’s certainly a good language that has noticeable advantages over Java.
What about the Dart with Flutter?
Kotlin is the wave of the future. I still use Java, but I’m transitioning into using Kotlin for backend services. The devs are my work have been moving the app codebase to Kotlin for a couple of years (over a million lines) and it’s pretty nice. You reduce a lot of boilerplate and the code can be a bit more dense.
