In my early days I spent most of my time fixing bugs on a huge enterprise application, so by now I learned from experience that a lot of bugs could have been easily prevented. This is why I prefer a Functional Programming style, I love how FP handles state. As a software consultant I get to switch companies and teams quite regularly and most projects I have been working on use java 7 or 8. This almost always leads to a few dicussions regarding programming style. So today I would like to talk about good FP principles, and how Java makes them hard (and why languages like Kotlin are awesome).
Most of my variables (95%+) are usually immutable, and I would like my compiler to check this for me. In Kotlin we have val and var to declare variables, val being immutable and val being mutable. To make a variable non-mutable in Java, we need to use the final keyword before all variables, including parameters to get the behaviour I desire.
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Back in '98 when I started with my CS education Java was the first programming language we were taught.
Before I had experimented with QBasic, C and assembly but that was the moment where I started to really grow into being a software engineer.
While I made something excursions to other languages; PHP, C#, JavaScript and even ColdFusion, Java always was my 'base' where I returned to.
My great love as it were.
But now she’s fallen out of fashion and I’m moving on to greener pastures: Kotlin.
You might notice quite a big gap between this post and the previous one.
There are multiple reasons for this (a project taking up a lot of my energy is one of them), but a big reason is that in my personal projects I don’t really feel like using Java anymore, but on the other hand Java is the common theme in most of my posts here.
This is also reflected in the traffic my blog is getting; the "how to do X" type posts are the most popular.
My definitive move towards Kotlin started in November last year with the (awesome, check them out!) Advent of Code contest of 2017.
I use these to challenge myself to learn new things.
Back in 2015 I used the challenge to learn Scala and last year I started using Kotlin to solve the 2017 challenges (link if you want to check them out).
While doing the 2017 challenges I was actually having so much fun with Kotlin that I started working on the 2016 challenges as well!
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