If you really really really wanted to avoid assign...

# announcements

[jshmrsn]

If you really really really wanted to avoid assigning a reasonable initial value, you can make the type optional (by adding an ?) and then assigning the value to null. But, this leads to the bad pattern of having uninitialized values floating around and it not being structurally clear when it's safe to start using them. Also, you'll have to add ? or !! to your accessing dots. See https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/null-safety.html