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Stacey
Stacey

Posted on • Originally published at Medium on

The Road Not Taken? — Kotlin or Java

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The first one-million dollar question that comes to every Android developer while starting a new projec t would be

To be or not to be? Kotlin or not Kotlin?

There are tons of articles out there for the reasons of picking up Kotlin. Here is one of it.

Java vs. Kotlin: Should You Be Using Kotlin for Android Development?

Personally, I would prefer to have Kotlin.

WHY?

Kotlin is interchangeable with Java, cleaner, more readable and “null- safety” feature of Kotlin helps developer to think thoroughly before hitting NPE (Null Pointer Exception).

Furthermore, Android announced to support Kotlin since May 2017!

Android Announces Support for Kotlin

We can also see the effort of Android team on improving Kotlin Development in Android Studio!

Introducing Android KTX: Even Sweeter Kotlin Development for Android

Not only that, Android team has actually used Kotlin while announcing new features in their latest video!

Kotlin tutorials can be found easily online!

Since Kotlin is interchangeable with Java, developers can continue to proceed with Java anytime.

P/S: * Developer can make a decision based on project timeline, familiarity to the language, further technical supports from third party (eg: client SDK)

Happy exploring!

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rhymes • Edited

The mobile team of one of my clients is developing every new feature in Kotlin, the core and the old code is still in Java but the new things use this language.

They seem very happy about it :-)