This is literally how this all started for us lol. Senior wanted to try to migrate everything to Kotlin in our project. Migration never finished. Now one of our major repos is just half Kotlin half Java. Devs on our team learn Kotlin by unexpectedly encountering it when they need to touch that code.
Maybe it’s because I know both languages but is that really a big issue for people? The interop is great, and kotlin is very readable, so the cost of context switching between the two is miniscule.
Some people have an extreme aversion to learning new things though. I feel that holding yourself to the standards and limits of your lowest performers isn’t a great thing.
Sounds like you’re making progress, your devs are slowly learning a better language that will let them work faster and will soon be able to help port the rest of the codebase and then you can really accelerate when no one needs to touch or know Java.
I really hope so. Last code I reviewed was full of !! and companion objects trying to emulate Java static instead of top-level consts. Even I’m still trying to figure out what idiomatic Kotlin looks like. We got a ways to go…
Doesn’t Kotlin has interoperability with Java? I didn’t used it much yet but I’m about to in a few months. Is it that difficult to just refactor things to Kotlin when you need to change something in the project? I’m asking because I just can’t work with verbose languages and would prefer Kotlin to Java everyday.
The interoperability is both a blessing and a curse imo since it let us half-ass the integration by leaving a bunch of Java code unconverted. I could start refactoring everything but then my team would stop reviewing my PRs due to the diff size (and then my manager would eventually find out that I’ve been using up work time doing this instead of shipping features during crunch week).
I really much prefer Kotlin to Java. I just wish my team had actually had a commitment to it instead of just sorta using it with no migration plan.
Just use Kotlin
This is literally how this all started for us lol. Senior wanted to try to migrate everything to Kotlin in our project. Migration never finished. Now one of our major repos is just half Kotlin half Java. Devs on our team learn Kotlin by unexpectedly encountering it when they need to touch that code.
Maybe it’s because I know both languages but is that really a big issue for people? The interop is great, and kotlin is very readable, so the cost of context switching between the two is miniscule.
Some people have an extreme aversion to learning new things though. I feel that holding yourself to the standards and limits of your lowest performers isn’t a great thing.
Sounds like you’re making progress, your devs are slowly learning a better language that will let them work faster and will soon be able to help port the rest of the codebase and then you can really accelerate when no one needs to touch or know Java.
I really hope so. Last code I reviewed was full of !! and companion objects trying to emulate Java static instead of top-level consts. Even I’m still trying to figure out what idiomatic Kotlin looks like. We got a ways to go…
Doesn’t Kotlin has interoperability with Java? I didn’t used it much yet but I’m about to in a few months. Is it that difficult to just refactor things to Kotlin when you need to change something in the project? I’m asking because I just can’t work with verbose languages and would prefer Kotlin to Java everyday.
The interoperability is both a blessing and a curse imo since it let us half-ass the integration by leaving a bunch of Java code unconverted. I could start refactoring everything but then my team would stop reviewing my PRs due to the diff size (and then my manager would eventually find out that I’ve been using up work time doing this instead of shipping features during crunch week).
I really much prefer Kotlin to Java. I just wish my team had actually had a commitment to it instead of just sorta using it with no migration plan.
Just use Scala*** ((objectively better language¹))
Just use Clojure****