What is Kotlin?

Kotlin is an open-source programming language made JetBrains. The development was started in the year 2010 and it has been open source since. Kotlin was first released to the world in February of 2016.

Kotlin is based on OOP (Object Oriented Programming) that has integration for JVM (Java Virtual Machine), all the java libraries and Android. Kotlin can be considered as a replacement for Java as it helps developers to write better code. Developers find Kotlin to be more easy-going than java as it removes the need to write long and redundant code.

Kotlin was created was the focus of it being easy to learn and it's code to be simple. It avoids the redundancy found in java by focusing on stripped down, functional code. One of the amazing features of Kotlin is the 'nullable'. It basically eliminates the null pointer exception errors which was a common problem for early android development.

Java had a syntax which made it necessary for developers to use a semicolon at the end of each statement. Kotlin on the other hand does not require any semicolon, but if a developer does use it out of muscle memory, Kotlin will not read it as a syntax error as Java's code is compatible with Kotlin. The developers say that you can call Kotlin based code in Java and Java based code in Kotlin.

Google in 2017, confirmed that Kotlin would be the first officially supported programming language in Android Studio and as of 2022, Google is committed to android development using Kotlin.

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