I've been thinking about switching to a JVM based language for backend development, the biggest contenders being Kotlin or Scala. Would anyone like to weigh in on which would be better to learn in Utah? I've some experience in Scala, but mostly Ruby and Javascript for the last 9 years. TIA

I don't have much by way of argument either way, but I'm in the same boat as you (ruby/js), but I've been slowly introducing kotlin where I work and it has been pretty great. I know there are some pretty big kotlin adopters in the market <cough>instructure</cough>.

Instructure and SoFi are the big ones I've heard about. OCTanner was converting to some Scala a while back and I think still is. Some smaller shops like Access Development can go either way I think.

yeah, that's it, I saw your name in some git history 😄

Curious as to how you made the switch. Did you mostly ready books/blogs/videos or did you get to learn hands on right away? I'm most likely going to study on my own and either convince my current job with a POC or look elsewhere.

well, I've been doing java since I started programming professionally, so the switch to kotlin was pretty natural. The language itself isn't too hard to pick up from books etc, but the jvm ecosystem is gigantic and it can take a while to find your bearings.

Any suggestions on learning the jvm ecosystem? I either see learning sources assume expert knowledge in Java or assume you know nothing about programming. I'll likely pick up some Java before learning Kotlin.

I don't think it's strictly necessary to learn java first, but it certainly helps because you'll be interfacing with java based libraries a lot. I think you'll get the biggest bang for your buck by learning some gradle basics (the build tool du jour) which will necessarily teach you about how the maven package repo works, etc.

Interesting, good to know.

there are tons of frameworks out there for the jvm. There's a web one called ktor that's kotlin native which I like a lot.

I did mostly play and akka with Scala but that doesn't seem very popular with kotlin. I'd heard of ktor.

yeah, there are tons of options. you can write akka with kotlin too if you're up to it 😉