A modern programming language that makes developers happier.

kotlinlang

What's the rules/topic of this channel? I asked a question and got "Not kotlin" and I don't know what that means. I assume I asked something off topic 

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Hi <@UF213R3MM> and welcome. I know its awkward that a lot of folks think they're just going to hammer the "Not Kotlin" emoji and expect you to know what they mean, but there are plenty of us here willing to explain.

Basically, these rooms are primarily for questions about the Kotlin language and development, so Android or very library specific questions that are particular to a platform are encouraged to go to the Android slack chats, etc. Many of the JetBrains team lead these chats as well and they are obviously trying to focus on improving Kotlin with a lot of the conversations here so an Android Gradle or Jetpack compose specific problem kind of muddy's the chats a lot.

No one means any harm, but as one would expect, developers aren't always great at empathy or understanding the value of non-programming languages lol. I hope this helps and you have a much better time on here going forward. If you need suggestions for better places for your other topics, feel free to reach out, but many channels will have suggestions if you click the name of the channel at the top or the "Channel Overview" tab. Its not particularly obvious the way slack is, but its there.

That makes sense now, thank you for clearing it up! <@U04UNDEGHNC> I really appreciate it

No problem at all. Have a great day my friend.

I feel like we need a simple autoresponder bot for things like this. No surprise, no one is actually using LLMs for the things they are perfect for like this:
1. Identifying a post that isn't kotlin
2. Auto-responding with an empathetic tone that actually explains it
3. Potentially even hiding the post if the confidence is high enough so the user gets what they need and the community has less distraction at the same time.
See reddit bots for some simplistic implementations of this

For most that run into this, they are new or semi-new to it all and they barely know (if they know at all) where Kotlin, Compose, etc. end and Android/Google/Device APIs begin. Its kind of a no-win solution when we just frustrate a new user who has no idea what we mean by "Not Kotlin" and the only answer they're left with is to try again, not understanding the original issue. The ecosystem won't grow if we don't welcome people, help them, AND give them the tools / the why to be helpers too.