Scala & Kotlin Comparison, What Kotlin Can (Graciously) Steal from Scala [KKON 2024 talk]

[@agathisthegreat]

What's all the fuss about compilation speed? Even if Scala was compiling 10 times slower than it does, it still would have amounted to 0.01% of my coding time, with incremental compilation and stuff.

[@vitaliiivanov9514]

I remember a guy from Kotlin team said they don't want to add advanced pattern matching since it is not just hard to implement but it would disproportionally increase the compiler codebase and recommended to use Scala for cases it is really needed.

[@hubstrangers3450]

Thank you....

[@flatmapper]

Love both languages. Would like to see unnamed tuples in Kotlin and in-place method parameter destructuring in the both languages. As in JavaScript method parameter destructuring

[@moverecursus1337]

Thanks!

[@flatmapper]

great

[@arnoldtuber]

So, Scala is better

[@MeMyselfEtMoi]

"Better" is relative. But in my experience, I was able to get productive with Kotlin after a weekend of intensive study, as a Java developer. Scala took me a few more weeks to get productive, and ruined every other programming language for me since. Once you get moving with Scala there's no going back.

[@hamesjetfield0]

It's a trade off. There are very few cases in software engineering where something is a straight up upgrade. 1. Kotlin has much better tooling. Scala support in IntelliJ is nowhere close to kotlin. 2. Kotlin has a much better multi-platform story. 3. If you're on android, Scala isn't a viable option at all. I'm sure you can get Scala to work on android, but you'd be going against the grain. Most of these are tooling issues rather than language issues but I'd rather use a 90% language with 100% tooling than a 100% language with 70% tooling. The one thing in Scala's favour is a more advanced type system, but Kotlin's type system is 85% of the way there so I don't miss it as much.

[@iluznm-ul2nz]

@@hamesjetfield0 I work on both Scala 3 and Kotlin projects switching back and forth. 1. IntelliJ plugins are on par. No major differences in functionality. Tooling for VSC is way better for Scala 3 thanks to Metals. And the Gradle is a tool designed in hell. It only works for simple single module projects. Anything more complex that this and all goes to hell. 2. Only if you care about mobile development. ScalaJS and scala native are very good. Language features matter. I simply cannot achieve same simplicity and being effective when using Kotlin. And Kotlin syntax sometimes is just awful. Especially when dealing with legacy Java code that uses Optional. And all of the kotlin's "!!", "?:", etc makes code look like it is written by a passive-aggressive person.

[@kmdsummon]

@@iluznm-ul2nzHow did you got metals to work? It always crashes and hangs - I was spending more time on restarting metals rather than coding. :/

[@iluznm-ul2nz]

@@kmdsummon Nothing special. Just installed the plugin and it just works. It is a relatively large project with multiple modules. Openjdk v21, Scala 3.3.4, sbt 1.9.9. I didn't try on Scala 2.x.

[@LA-fb9bf]

Scala allows too complex code and has much worse tooling and IDE support. And as we know, the tool that needs less effort for a developer will win at the end..

[@LA-fb9bf]

The Problem with scala: of Sant to understand the Code of another developer Like yours, you Are lost. Takes a lot of time. Kotlin is much easier!

[@mrdkyzmrdany8742]

Yeah, Kotlin is VisualBasic compared to Scala - Oh so "simple", but oh so *demented* !!! Come preach AFTER you are able to grok why you need Higher-Kinded types / Algebraic effects / Macros (after reaching abstraction level / scale requiring such "hard" features)...

[@mrdkyzmrdany8742]

And how about the ton of stuff Kotlin can never hope to touch? Compared to Scala, Kotlin is VisualBasic.