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Say Hi to “Kotlin”
I started my career as a Java developer. After six years of love-hate relationship, I jumped into the world of .Net and never looked back. In my hunt to learn new technologies, I stumbled across Kotlin and found this an excellent opportunity to get my hands dirty at java again.
Over the past three years, my mantra to learn anything new has been to write about it. So here it comes. Please join me in saying “Hi to Kotlin.”
What is Kotlin?
- Kotlin is an open-source language JVM language. It means that Kotlin compiles down to java byte code. It also means Java and Kotlin code can co-exist at the same place. If you have worked on Java and understand basic Java concepts, learning Kotlin is not that difficult.
- Kotlin is an Object-oriented programming language, so it has classes and methods much like any other OOPs language.
- One significant benefit of Kotlin is that it supports functional programming. It means Kotlin is a great programming choice to design complex software systems.
Install Kotlin command line compiler
There are various means to install Kotlin command-line compiler. The easiest way is to download the latest release from Github. The most recent stable release is present at Kotlin command-line compiler | Kotlin (kotlinlang.org). The website also details ways of installing the Kotlin command line compiler on different operating systems.
If you have downloaded the latest version from Github, make sure you point your path environment variable to the bin folder.
Once you have downloaded Kotlin libraries and updated path variables, let’s open the command prompt and run some code snippets.
The good old “Hello World” program
In this section, I will demonstrate how to write a simple “Hello World” program in Kotlin.
