Just get interviewed, used Kotlin, not so familiar...

# random

[magisu]

Just get interviewed, used Kotlin, not so familiar with it and got damned.

[Fudge]

Were you asked about kotlin or did you choose it yourself as a way of writing code?

[Shawn]

yeah, if you get to pick the language, you always ought to use one you’re very familiar with, and is optimally very fast to write by hand

[poohbar]

I always use assembly during interviews to establish my dominance. 😎

[Shawn]

please, if you’re not writing your own classloader to call hand-written jvm bytecode from clojure are you really even trying?

[Luke Sleeman]

I’m sorry to hear that your interview didn’t’ turn out well @magisu! Good on you for trying something you are not so familiar with 👏👏

What are some of the things you learnt from the experience?

[bjonnh]

Just use COBOL and get a job for life.

[magisu]

@Luke Sleeman -- I think I still like Kotlin a lot. So Kotlin tastes a little bit Python and much of Ruby. Some points: (1) In Ruby, we know that a method ends with ! will modify this, e.g. sort! will sort this while sort will return a sorted this but keep this intacted; in Kotlin you have to remember dropLast and removeAt.

[bjonnh]

Agreed, in kotlin you have List and MutableList that can help handling that.

[magisu]

(2) I am not so sure if in Kotlin, Array could be used as key of a MutableMap

[magisu]

So in Python, List cannot be hashed, but a Tuple could.

[magisu]

But anyway, I made the code work at last and got an onsite 🙂

[magisu]

It just took the entire hour. I thought I could finish the code in Python within 20 mins.

[bjonnh]

Cool what kind of company is that? Are they using Kotlin?

[magisu]

nope they are using java. I just volunteered to Kotlin to see if I am good enough at that language. I started kotlin in just 2 weeks 🙂

[magisu]

I still love kotlin more than any other jvm language.

[magisu]

they said it's fine to use any languages if I can make the code work within 1 hour.

[bjonnh]

I never did Java, but needed to use Java libs. Tried Scala first, found it impossible for getting started… Was done with Kotlin in 2 days…

[magisu]

No, I never use java. I hate the all-class design of the language.

[magisu]

I tried scala, it's a bit hard to learn.

[magisu]

Clojure -- lisp in jvm

[magisu]

Kotlin -- Ruby in jvm

[magisu]

I love Ruby so why not kotlin?

[bjonnh]

you will have to use Java no in that company? How are you going to deal with that?

[bjonnh]

btw val a = mutableMapOf<Array<Int>, String>() totally works

[magisu]

Yes that works.

[magisu]

But what if I change the value of the key?

[magisu]

I never tried...

[magisu]

Well, I will talk with them onsite about Java. If it is a whole java company, I need to consider the salary then 🙂

[bjonnh]

Are they having trouble finding Java devs

[bjonnh]

you should get them to try Kotlin for small new projects

[magisu]

In my current company I am using kotlin, I have demonstrated it takes less time to develop and the code is much easier to understand. Then they asked me to rewrite it in Java.

[bjonnh]

Jetbrains is working on a Kotlin2Java converter. But yeah I can see that as a reason to leave 😉

[magisu]

Sssssshh...I do not have an offer in hand so far...

[magisu]

@Luke Sleeman -- oh yeah, another thing to point out, if you write kotlin during interview you need to explain more as you have to expect that the interviewers do not know, e.g. what does "products.map { it.productName }" mean.

[bjonnh]

Doesn't Lombok have map?

[magisu]

No idea. I actually do not use Java myself.

[magisu]

I know Lombok but no more understanding.

[bjonnh]

me neither, I just know many java people say it brings most of the advantage that kotlin has to java (but looking at their website it seems to lack quite a bit of features)

[magisu]

How I used a simple line of coroutine and saved a thread pool.

[magisu]

I do not know how to do that in java.

[bjonnh]

coroutines still use thread pool in the back

[magisu]

Saved an explicit thread pool.