Kotlin First: Don’t be Left Out … Oliver Mensah

Oliver Mensah ❖ National Service Personnel at Agro Innova ❖ Guest Author at Auth0 ❖ Co-Lead at Developer Circles Accra ❖ Software Developer ❖ Technical Writer ❖ Developer Community Enthusiast

A brief history of Kotlin Programming Language ○ Modern language that gives developers power for everyday tasks ○ Developed by JetBrains in 2011 and Open Sourced in 2012 ○ Statically typed language which runs in the JVM ○ At Google I/O 2017, Google announced First-class support for Kolin on Android ○ Many more...

Kotlin benefits ○ Concise ○ Safe ○ Interoperable ○ Tons of higher order functions on collections ○ Extension functions without inheriting from them. ○ Many more...

Kotlin at Google I/O 2019 “Today we’re announcing another big step: Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain. And we’re continuing to invest in tooling, docs, trainings and events to make Kotlin even easier to learn and use.

Android Gets Nicer with Kotlin ○ Mutators mapped to properties ○ Interface with one method mapped to lambdas

Lambdas ○ Callback and listeners made easier in Android

Background Process made Easier with Anko ○ So many options like RxJava, etc. But are complex ○ Simplified with kotlin power

Enhancement with Collections ○ Get functional with Collection operators ○ Harder to add errors to the code ○ Save many lines of code thus enhancing code expressivity and readability

No Nullity ○ Say goodbye to NullPointerException with Kotlin

Safe Singleton ○ Sometimes we just need a single implementation ○ Kotlin makes that easy with object data type

Exploring Deeper, Where to Go Next? ○ Kotlin Everywhere ○ The budding Ghana Android Developer Community

Questions?

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