Introduction to the Kotlin programming language
The Kotlin programming language was created by JetBrains in 2010 and released the first version in 2011, it's a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference.
At Google I/O 2019, Google announced that Android development will be Kotlin-first. But why ?
Why Kotlin ?
Kotlin is a safer language than Java, with @Nullable and @NonNull included in its type system, Kotlin helps you avoid NullPointerExceptions. Android apps that use Kotlin are 20% less likely to crash.
Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and the JVM version of Kotlin's standard library depends on the Java Class Library
Kotlin coroutines offer asynchronous code as easy to work with as blocking code.
As I mention before Kotlin also cross-platform, Kotlin code can compile native binaries with Kotlin/Native which means it can run without a virtual machine. it can also transpile to Javascript which means you can write frontend applications and you can also use it for server-side.
Kotlin is supported by all major Java IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, and Eclipse.
In this tutorial series, we are going to use Intellij IDEA. you can download it from here
Let's dive in the Kotlin world.