My Top 8 Reasons Why Kotlin Makes Me a More Productive Software Engineer

Being productive with modern programming languages, by a software engineer who has been using Kotlin for over 5 years

I’ve been writing code for the JVM for more than 10 years now, many of those using Java. This changed about five or six years ago when I picked up Kotlin. By now, I managed to drop the Java language completely in favor of Kotlin. I did this because I feel much more productive with the language. It lets me focus more on the business logic rather than forcing me to write boilerplate code over and over again. In this post, I will share my top 8 reasons why Kotlin makes me a more productive developer.

I certainly know Kotlin much better than I ever knew Java. For what it’s worth, I had been certified as a Java expert by Oracle some years back. Still, Kotlin became my native programming language, and I want to encourage you to consider it too. When I talk about my Kotlin productivity, this is mainly based on personal sentiment and not backed by actual data. I’m in a particular situation as I picked up the language rather early, right before 1.0 was released, and also worked as a teacher for the language ever since. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that some of the arguments in favor of Kotlin apply to many more of you, so let’s see what I’m talking about.

My JVM background

I used Java intensively for some years and wrote a lot of productive code with the language. Java was my first language, and I did not know other languages very well at that point. In the meantime I have been exposed to many different programming languages such as TypeScript, Go, C#, Swift, and more.

I never really felt much joy when using Java, which changed a bit with the arrival of Java 8 back in 2014. I immediately fell in love with the functional aspects that were added to the language and used lambdas and streams all over our code base. Of course, this wasn’t always appropriate.

Yet, it was bleeding Java edge, and I loved it. At that time, I started looking into other JVM languages and started to learn Scala at some point. I began by reading its documentation which was fun at first but then quickly started…