Programming Kotlin

Chapter 3Working with Functions

Kotlin doesn’t insist that you create classes for everything. No one gets praise for duplicating code, but to reuse doesn’t mean building a class hierarchy. Unlike Java where a class is the smallest reusable piece, in Kotlin both standalone functions and classes can be reused.

Kotlin takes a highly pragmatic approach to creating good quality code—create small simple standalone functions where they suffice and roll your code into methods of classes only when necessary. In this chapter, we’ll focus on standalone functions for two reasons. First, because we can—that is, in Kotlin we can create top-level standalone functions to reuse code and don’t have to waste our time and effort with classes if there’s little ...