Programming Kotlin

Chapter 2Kotlin Essentials for the Java Eyes

Simple things should be easy to create, and complicated things should be affordable. Quick, how many lines of code do you need to programmatically find the number of cores on a machine? How about the following:

println(Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors())

That’s the entire program in Kotlin—with only half a line of code, no need for a semicolon, no imports, and using the Java JDK but with far less code and ceremony. That’s Kotlin.

Kotlin is about getting your work done; it doesn’t impose ceremony on you. You can start small and scale up. Programming is a series of mini experiments; you often prototype solutions to see if things make sense, and write code to get a feel and to tease out design ...