Kinda feel silly but I can't wrap my head around people using different functions to essentially just do a null check. I still find

if (myItem != null) { //do something }

makes sense in kotlin as it does in java. Is using

let{}

really needed? Would someone say that my if statement is not idiomatic? I like to follow the 90 day rule. If I come back to the code in 90 days... which one will I understand? I feel that most would choose the if.

I wondered this too. There is a discussion in the forums that might be interesting to you (it was for me): https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/let-vs-if-not-null/3542 As usual it seems to come down to preference. In that post there are many approaches including someones custom rolled helper

After some time spent looking at other people’s kotlin code I can tell there’s a tendency to overuse block functions to try and squeeze null checks and if/else in the same expression. Unfortunately this results in hard to read code, where a simple if would have sufficed. I noticed this trend being similar to the introduction of Optional in Java 8: lots of our production code became unreadable because they had to forcefully use Optional everytime! gosh… 🤦‍♂️

Thanks. I just ran into an issue where I was using

let{}

instead of

?let{}

and got completely different behavior. Had no idea. 😄 Still taking some time to get used to all of these block functions.

When you have a shared variable, eg a property, and you want to perform a null check, you need a local variable to ensure another thread doesnt change the variable. A ?.let{} is easier than introducing a local variable most of the time. Or when chaining a few calls. Otherwise I prefer simple ifs over the heavy use of those block functions.