In this article let’s take a look at a few reasons why learning Kotlin as a programming language is definitely worth it for app & game development.
This is the most comprehensive article you can find online on this topic so I would recommend you to bookmark and share the article because in this article you will find out whether you should be learning Kotlin as a programming language or not in detail.
So without any delay let’s dive right in.
Is kotlin a good programming language for app & game development?
Yes, Kotlin is a very good language to learn for app and web development because it is not only easy to learn as a high level programming language but also platform independent, open source and free to learn, used in various areas like web development machine learning app development game development etc, and more importantly it has deep interoperability with Java which
means that all the frameworks and tools of Java can work alongside with Kotlin and Kotlin is the language that can be run on Java virtual machine so you don’t have to switch between languages to edit code which makes it more compelling for developers to learn this language because now this is the official language for Android app development and many top companies like Google Spotify Netflix Evernote Pinterest etc are using this language for Android apps.
Now let’s take a look at all the reasons why you should be learning this language in detail here.
5 reasons why learning Kotlin is good language and worth it
- It is very easy to learn
One of the main advantages of learning Kotlin is that it is very easy to learn and understand for beginners.
Just like other programming languages like Python and Java Kotlin is also a high level programming language which means that it is very easy for beginners to understand the syntax and get used to the code.
And as compared to Java Kotlin is better because you will have to write 40% of less lines of code to execute As compared to Java so it is more concise, easy to learn and write and also a fast language compared to Java so overall
Kotlin is a good replacement for Java as official Android development language and because it is a high level language it is easy to understand and has small learning curve, It is good for both beginners and experience developers.
- Lots of career paths
Another advantage of learning Kotlin is that you can get lots of career options and paths by learning Kotlin because Kotlin is again a general purpose programming language.
You can not only use this language in Android app development but also in other areas like web development, machine learning, data science, game development, etc.
Some popular apps that use Kotlin are Pinterest Spotify Google, Pinterest, Square, Evernote, Netflix base camp Zomato, etc so as you can see many large companies also use this language in creating apps on Android devices and since this large companies are started using this language so slowly other companies will also start using this language and you would see a slow but gradual growth of demand of kotlin developers in the companies.
- It is open source & free
Another advantage of learning Kotlin is that it is open source and free to learn.
Ever since Google replaced Kotlin as the official language for Android app development from Java, It is more easy and convenient to learn this language from various resources like online coding courses on udemy and Coursera, online coding bootcamps, online coding websites, coding books, etc.
And just like other top programming languages like Python and Java even this language is also open source so there are multiple benefits of open source like freedom and flexibility, better security, cost effectiveness, etc.
- Lots of features of this language
Another advantage is that this language also has so many features and benefits like,
- It is a platform independent language like Java
- It is multi platform language which can be used for both iOS and Android development
- It has both object oriented programming and functional programming unlike Java Which only has object oriented
- It has deep interoperability with Java and its frameworks, tools as this language will run on Java virtual machine & before Kotlin Java was the official language for Android app development
- It also has lazy loading feature
- It is also very safe and reliable language as compared to Java as you need to write 40% less number of lines of code in Kotlin as compared to Java so less errors, bugs and faster output
Because of all these amazing features of this language is also one reason why you should be learning it.
- It is new & less competitive
Last but not least it is also very relatively new language and also has very less competition as compared to other programming languages for example.
There are around 10 million Java developers worldwide and Java was released two decades ago and there are similarly 10 million Python developers worldwide but there are only 1.6 million kotlin developers so you can see there are not many developers who are specialised in this language.
Even though you can use this language in other areas but this language is mainly popular for creating mobile applications on Android app development.
So this is not fad language, but it is one of the best programming languages you can learn because there are not so many developers out there who are working on it, and if you see the average salary of a Kotlin developer is around 110,000 USD.
And it is a relatively new programming language because it is released back in 2016 as compared to Java which was released two decades ago in 1996 and Python in 1991.
And more importantly Google itself which is the largest search engine on the planet has confirmed that Kotlin is going to be the official language for app development on Android devices so it is definitely a very good choice to learn this language and it is of course worth it.
And there is also a good community of developers using Kotlin on various forums like stack overflow and Kotlin website.
These are all the reasons for you should be learning Kotlin as a programming language and it is definitely worth learning.
How is Kotlin different & better than Java?
I know you might be wondering that if the language has similar features like Java then why we should be switching to Kotlin if you just stick with Java is it not a good idea.
But here is the main difference between Kotlin and Java.
In Kotlin you will have to write 40% less number of lines of code as compared to Java because Kotlin is more concise and you can execute the code in less number of lines so there are less errors in Kotlin compared to Java and it is also faster to execute, This is more type safe as compared to Java, there is no null pointer exception in Kotlin which prevents it from crashing the app as compared to Java so overall these are a few main reasons which make Kotlin different and better language than Java but apart from this most of the features are common in both.
These are all the reasons why you should be learning Kotlin programming language for various purposes like app development web development data science machine learning game development etc because obviously it is a general purpose programming language.
With that said let’s conclude the article.
Conclusion
These are all the reasons kotlin is a good language to learn for game development and other purposes.
Do let me know what are your thoughts about learning kotlin in the comment section below and also obviously share the article and subscribe to my blog to receive notifications as whenever I publish a new article in future.