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Ask HN: Kotlin vs. Swift vs. Groovy vs. Scala

1 points by perryprog ↗ HN
Links in comments.

I was reading this very interesting article about kotlin: https://medium.com/@magnus.chatt/why-you-should-totally-switch-to-kotlin-c7bbde9e10d5?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496065730

And I made this comment: https://medium.com/@perry.j.fraser/so-why-should-i-use-kotlin-instead-of-swift-groovy-or-scala-1d2e9e539f49?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496066029

I haven't gotten any response, and I still would like to answer this question.

3 comments

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vorg
Maybe you haven't gotten any response because it's a leading question -- why did you choose those specific languages to compare Kotlin to? Anyway...

* Swift is for the iOS platform, which Kotlin doesn't target.

* Apache Groovy is primarily a dynamic language with static typing as an afterthought, and is really only relevant anymore for Grails development. Gradleware are no doubt busy writing a tool to automatically convert Groovy-based build files to Kotlin-based ones for the next big upgrade to Gradle.

* Scala is comparable to Kotlin, but Kotlin is officially supported, along with Java, by the Android team at Google. And Jetbrains make sure Kotlin and IntelliJ (and Android Studio) work seamlessly together.

perryprog
That makes a lot of sense, thank you!