Mantas Gridinas If you were to introduce a bunch o...

# getting-started

[s952163]

Mantas Gridinas
If you were to introduce a bunch of kids with little to no programming background to a programming language, would you pick Kotlin?
Posted in #getting-startedToday at 7:33 PM

[poohbar]

s952163: I most likely would not. Kotlin is very dependent on Java stdlib (collections) and is very tightly coupled to IntelliJ. Which is awesome but it just does too much stuff for a beginner to grasp.

[s952163]

i dont see that as an issue but then u could default to python 🤷

[kirillrakhman]

you don't need to use all of the language features and you can start with http://try.kotlinlang.org/ and put everything at the top-level. this could work ok

[dalexander]

I think one of the most important things in a teaching language is not having to introduce a ton of “magic” up front to make a simple program, and I think Kotlin does okay with that.

[elizarov]

IntelliJ is great for kind. I taught by 10yo daughter Python in PyCharm and Kotlin in IDEA is going to be next. We'll release kotlin script support for Processing.ORG libraries some time soon. This way you can start coding fun stuff in Kotlin with zero boilerplate.

[poohbar]

I think Python is one of the most overrated languages for learning. I don't see how can such an inconsitent language be valuable in any sort of learning. Class declaration is also super messy and the standard lib is awful.

Kotlin introduces a whole lot of magic up front. But you could maybe skip the magic parts. Or are you trying to say that data class is not magic? If you don't know Java it makes no sense what it actually does.

[elizarov]

You can pick which parts you teach. Look at processing.org, for example. They are based on Java, but choose to teach simpler parts of it

[elizarov]

However, Java has a lot of boilerplate just to get you started, so they had to pre-processed their .pde file into valid Java code, which makes them unsuable in all the other Java IDEs without special support.

[elizarov]

With kotlin script, on the other hand, it is boilerplatefree out-of-the box.