Kotlin - The Next Enterprise Language

1. Kotlin - The next enterprise language The enterprise is dominated by 2 key programming languages Java and C# with many companies either choosing 1 or the other or even both for their backend systems. It makes a lot of sense to use a single core language for a company as it is cheaper to run and easier to resource — the benefits for a large corporation clearly out weigh the negatives. When engineers start a new project we often like to use the latest technology out there in the hope that this new technology will make it easier and faster to build our products. My manager once told me of about a project where Closure, a n e w p r o g r a m m i n g language at the time, was chosen for this exact reason. However when the engineers left the company and they tried to backfill these positions they struggled to find even a single candidate who knew Closure. Yet on their Java projects they could easily source a candidate from over

2. 20K java resumes if needed. I’m sure you’ve also heard of or worked on a project where a new technology was adopted, things went south and the new technology was blamed for the project’s demise. It explains why some managers and companies are often reluctant and aphrenrsive when adopting new things. But what if the rewards are worth the risk? What if a small change could have a big impact and save your company money? Before I answer that, let’s go back a few years when times were also tough during the Dot-com bust of 2002. It wasn’t a great time to be in IT with mass layoffs and budget cuts, and the need to do more with less was even greater. This mindset to save money and be more productive was one of the big catalyst that drove the adoption of open source. If we didn’t have that dark period in IT, where would we be today? Would GitHub or Stack-overflow even exist at all? Choosing the right technology is alway a hard choice especially when we have so many choices. I usually base my decision on 3 things — maturity, support & popularity. All technologies will eventually have an expiry date however you want to maximize it’s shelf life and get as many miles as you can on whatever you choose.

3. I strongly believe that Kotlin is going to be the next enterprise language on the block. It has so many things going for it that it would be difficult to overlook if you are starting a new Java project. • Backed by both  JetBrains and Google  — The IntelliJ IDE is written in Kotlin & Google has written over 1 million lines of Kotlin code on both their client & backend apps. • Excellent community support, with a growing number of libraries now written purely in Kotlin. Spring now recommends that Kotlin should be used to write new Spring Boot APIs. • Excellent tool chain and IDE support, Kotlin is a first class citizen in both IntelliJ & Android Studio. It can also be used in Gradle to write your build scripts. • Full interoperability with Java and its eco-system. • Native support, so you can choose to run your code outside the JVM —now that’s real code portability. • Modern language features which enables you to write 30% less code than Java — it’s years ahead of where Java needs to be and was designed to avoid the null pointer or checked exception issues that have plagued Java apps.

4. • Very easy to learn and pick up— there are lots of free Kotlin courses and tutorials out there. Kotlin shares the same DNA as Java so it looks and feels familiar, not like a foreign language. • Versatility, it can be used to build APIs, Android, iOS, Windows or web apps - pretty much any type of application you can think of. • It has now been mature and stable for quite some time. Kotlin 1.4 was just released with a big focus on quality and stability. • It has a cool name and is extremely popular with 5.8 million developer writing Koltin code in that last 12 months. Koltin has avoided the mistakes that the other JVM languages have made and was carefully designed with these lessons in mind. If you got burnt using other JVM languages don’t let it stop you from taking a look at Kotlin. There are just too many benefits to pass up and it might even help you with your budget. Let’s say you have 100 developers in your company earning $100K a year. If you decide to write all your code in Kotlin on your projects and since Kotlin is a more productive language and easier to maintain you could save a considerable amount of money . Let’s be conservative and put this cost saving at 10%, after 5 years that a saving of $5 million, at 20% its $10 million so not a small amount of money in either case. There also other intangibles

5. benefits such as developer retention and satisfaction from using a more modern language. On our Android app we have noticed that converting 95% of the code to Kotlin has helped us keep the total number of lines of code stable while also adding new features. The nullability features of Kotlin have also enabled us to reduce our crash rates to below 0.02%. We often look at technologies which are the flavour of the month in the hope that these technologies will drive business outcomes and transform our company. Many of these projects often fail to deliver their promises however making a simple language switch and a change from other App Development to Kotlin App Development is a risk free and a guaranteed investment. You don’t get too many of those in this world. Although Oracle has recently stepped up it game to improve Java with the release of JDK 14 and has switched to 6 monthly releases, the reality is that on most platforms where you can’t chose your own container such as GCP cloud functions and AWS lambdas the highest supported Java version is still Java 11. Most of the recent Java releases have also been focused more on improving the runtime and packaging rather than the language itself. Oracle is working on Fibers their answer to coroutines in Kotlin but at the end of day Java is still at least

6. 5 years behind Kotlin in terms of being a modern up to date language. So do you want to use the best language that is ready today or one that will be ready in 5 years time? Java has been an incredibly successful language/platform making a big impact in the industry. It still deserves a lot of credit, did you know that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Java? It recently celebrated its 25th birthday and it still has a few more years left in it. I still like Java although it’s starting show it’s age but I prefer to write all my new code in Kotlin. Many of our developers at India Post have also made the switch, and are using kotlin to write new microservices and Android apps. There are now more and more job opportunities for Kotlin with a growing number of foreign companies using it. I hope more engineering managers, developers and tech leads from the enterprise make the switch, it’s a no brainer but of course you still need to do your own due diligence first. Although I talked about Kotlin in the enterprise its also a great fit for any startup considering Java.