this is some day 35 of me tryna learn kotlin and I...

# getting-started

[lokesh]

this is some day 35 of me tryna learn kotlin and I'm honestly not enjoying it at all.
just doing it because I really wanna be an android app dev and folks out there made this official language of their system.
people say it's the future.
everyday I wake up and regret my decision. I look at code in tutorials and wonder what's happening.
I start writing code and well, I can't.
I sound frustrated and I really really am.
another reason I don't wanna stop is to make myself open to new thinkings, cause I find myself looking styles, features, techniques, thinking of other languages.

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

A language is just a tool that you use to give the machine some instructions. You take the solution that you have in your head or on a piece of paper, and you translate it into instructions.

From your previous two posts, it sounds like you want Kotlin to be something else, and that's not going to happen after the 15 years of this language existing.

So your two choices are:
1. Try to swim against the current and somehow bring paradigms from other languages into your Kotlin code
2. Swim with the current, accept how the language handles things, and flow with it

[Casey Brooks]

Or consider alternative cross-platform frameworks like React Native or Flutter. There's even a new SwiftUI, Skip framework for writing multiplatform apps. Most of those will require at least some kotlin to bridge to the native Android platform, but you can absolutely make Android apps without a Kotlin being the main language.

That said, I think if you give yourself some time to learn things "the kotlin way", you'll find it is a very nice language, and in many ways is objectively better than those other options. And that's not just my opinion, Kotlin was very intentionally designed to fix many of the problems inherent in those other languages/platforms. Yes, it has its own syntax and idiosyncrasies, but if you stop trying to fit Kotlin into the paradigms of other languages, and instead embrace Kotlin as it is, I think you'll grow to like it.

[Horatio Thomas]

If your purpose of learning Kotlin was to get into Android, I would recommend switching to learning Android. You can just learn the basics of Kotlin before learning Android. If you start learning Android, Kotlin might make more sense to you and might become more meaningful for you. As you're learning Android and you see a language feature you don't understand, you can go and learn it now that you've seen the context of how it's used and it may make more sense to you.

[James Richardson]

I realise that this is a kotlin slack... flutter is actually quite nice for Android. You can write apps that will run on android just fine with it... but it wont help at all i expect if you want to be an "android app dev" because people expect you to know android, and flutter paradigm is very different.
All these systems have a lot of moving parts - language, runtime, system, constraints, user interface, etc etc, and it can be a bit overwhelming to deal with them all at once. Especially as a lot of the things can appear to conflict with each other !

[lokesh]

@Kirill Grouchnikov I do really want kotlin to change my opinion about programming or else late alan perlis will be disappointed.

[loke]

@lokesh if you want your opinion of programming in general to change (or perhaps, expanded) learning Kotlin on top of any of the other millions of imperative structured programming languages isn't going to change anything.

Kotlin is a tool, and compared to Java, a pretty nice one. Is it a remarkable new way of thinking about programming? Absolutely not.

[loke]

If you want to try something truly different, go for Lisp or an array language (like APL, J, BQN, etc)