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Kotlin

A concise multiplatform language developed by JetBrains

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Why Learn Kotlin?

Kotlin has always been and continues to be a modern language in the industry, addressing the real needs of real developers. It is increasingly being adopted in many trending fields, including mobile, web, server-side and cloud development, data science, and education.

This all gives a strong indication that there is already significant demand for Kotlin developers and there will continue to be in the future.

So where can you start learning this skill? “Atomic Kotlin”!

This book is suited for Kotlin learners of all levels, and it is available in print and as an ebook. It breaks Kotlin programming language concepts into atoms, and provides hands-on exercises inside IntelliJ IDEA.

To celebrate the recent release of “Atomic Kotlin”, we asked our Twitter community to share their motivation for learning Kotlin. You all did not disappoint! There were a lot of great responses from the community, and we saw a couple of patterns emerging. In this post, we are going to share with you some of the answers people gave about why Kotlin is a great language to learn.

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Modern Language

Kotlin is a modern programming language that combines all the best bits of imperative, object-oriented, and functional programming. It is general-purpose and multi-paradigm, and conciseness and safety are some of the language’s key features.

Easy to Learn

Kotlin’s syntax is simple to grasp for beginners, while at the same time, the language offers sophisticated powerful features for experienced programmers.

Kotlin can build on the learners’ previous programming experience. It is simple to grasp for those with a Java or Python background. Kotlin’s syntax is also easy to learn for iOS developers because it is based on the same modern concepts they are already familiar with.

Great Materials

There is a lot of up-to-date material available to help you learn Kotlin. One of our favorite resources for learning Kotlin from scratch is “Atomic Kotlin”. Readers can see their progress while solving the tasks that are checked automatically within IntelliJ IDEA. There are hints and solutions to help them out if they get stuck. All the examples in “Atomic Kotlin” are available in this GitHub repository. You can compile, run, and test the examples which are automatically extracted directly from the book.

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You can learn what the authors of “Atomic Kotlin”, Bruce Eckel and Svetlana Isakova, think about learning the language in this episode of the JetBrains Connect series. In it, they discuss the question of why to learn Kotlin, with host Paul Everitt:

Multiplatform

Because it is a language that supports multiplatform targets, you can run Kotlin on virtually any device these days, be it a PC or a Mac, and also as native code. You can also reduce the time you spend writing and maintaining the same code for those platforms by sharing Kotlin code across them.

In addition to being the official language for Android development, Kotlin is a proven technology for building cross-platform mobile applications. It eliminates all the disadvantages of other leading approaches and lets you create mobile apps with native performance and UIs while sharing the business logic completely. Visit the Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile portal to learn more.

Progression from Java

Kotlin’s interoperability allows it to be introduced seamlessly anywhere you’re already using Java. Kotlin fixes some of the issues Java suffers from and has some features that are absent from Java.

Career prospects

Many great companies already use Kotlin to build their products, and Kotlin skills are increasingly in demand as more and more businesses are adopting the language. Indeed, the number of Kotlin job postings has skyrocketed by 1400% since 2017 (Source: Dice).

Community Driven

Since its very beginning in 2011, Kotlin has been developed as an open-source language.

Kotlin evolves with the help of our diverse community, which includes almost 200 Kotlin User Groups, 37K+ Kotlinlang Slack users, and countless other members spread across our forum, our sub-Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and many other platforms. Over 450 contributors are working on Kotlin, including 90 JetBrains developers.

Your feedback provides the basis for our roadmap. Thank you for your continued support!

Why did you Learn Kotlin?

If you haven’t already taken up Kotlin, we hope that this post has left you feeling inspired to do so. We would love to hear about your own motivations for learning Kotlin in the comments below. If you share your story with us, you will also have the chance to win an “Atomic Kotlin” ebook!

We’ll select 5 winners from the commenters to this post on May 12.

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