Java is Great but Kotlin and Scala will Take over it Soon: James Ward

Java is still a great language, but Kotlin is developing faster as an incremental alternative, while Scala takes Functional Programming to some extremes.

James Ward is a Java Champion and Kotlin Product Manager at Google. He hosts the "Happy Path Programming" podcast with Bruce "Thinking in Java" Eckel. In one episode, Eckel spoke of "people who are still trapped in the Java world." Ward agreed and called default mutability in Java the "trillion-dollar mistake" (referencing the "billion-dollar mistake" of NullPointerExceptions). Recently, InfoQ asked James about the state of JVM languages in 2022. To which he replied, "I began using the Java programming language 25 years ago and think it is still a great language. But I've also been able to work with more modern JVM languages over the past ten years, including Scala and Kotlin. Scala is great for developers wanting to take Functional Programming to some extremes. Kotlin is more of an incremental step for existing Java developers having good support for some Functional paradigms like immutability and sum types but lacking some of the "Monadic" features that Scala has. Both Kotlin and Scala have great interoperability with Java, enabling ecosystem sharing. JVM developers have many options for great languages and a lot of tooling overlap (build tools, IDEs, production/introspection tools, etc.). It is great that on the JVM, in one large ecosystem, there is such a spectrum of language options."

Java is one of the top programming languages and the development platform for universal programmers and developers. It helps to reduce costs and shortens development time frames while driving innovation and enhancing application devices. It is focused on continuing the development platform for choices for enterprises as well as developers. This programming language is focused on managing business needs and being the best choice for security as well as cloud development needs.

The object-oriented programming language is known for supporting modernization and transformation efforts. It is also known as the high-level, robust, and secure programming language for programmers, developers, and data professionals. Java was launched by Sun Microsystems, currently the subsidiary of Oracle, in 1995, with James Gosling as the Father of Java. This programming language is also known as the platform because of the runtime environment as well as APIs.

Now, if Java's been the go-to programming language for all Android matters, Kotlin here is the "one-stop language" for all application development. Kotlin developed by JetBrains and endorsed by Google is an open-sourced programming language that brings the best of two worlds – functional and object-oriented- under a single roof outsmarting the very own Java 6. Since Kotlin's first release, Google has fine-tuned its foundation to make it a dominant player in developing enterprise web and Android applications. In fact, Kotlin solves many of the problems unaddressed by Java. Although Java and Kotlin codes are remarkably similar, Kotlin programming wins the bet by making shorter and cleaner codes.

On the other hand, Scala is a general-purpose, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language. It is a pure object-oriented programming language that also provides support to the functional programming approach. Scala programs can convert to bytecodes and can run on the JVM. Scala stands for Scalable language and also provides JavaScript runtimes. The programming language is highly influenced by Java and some other programming languages like Lisp, Haskell, and many more. Scala provides language interoperability with Java so that libraries written in either language may be referred directly to Scala or Java code.

Why Scala over Java?

Unlike Java, Scala possesses several features of functional programming languages like Scheme, Standard ML, and Haskell, for currying, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching. It also has an advanced type system supporting algebraic data types, covariance, and contravariance, optional parameters, and other support facilities. Scala makes no distinction between statements and expressions. In simple terms, Scala language is designed to grow with the demands of its user, from writing small scripts to building a massive system for data processing. Scala language can be extensively used in data processing, distributed computing, and web development. It powers the data engineering infrastructure of several enterprises.

Why Kotlin is better than Java?

All Java libraries and development frameworks are perfectly compatible with Kotlin. This makes it easier for Android app development companies to smoothly switch to Kotlin from Java. If you are an Android developer, you can easily use Kotlin without making any major changes, such as converting an entire project in terms of coding. This is, in fact, one of the biggest advantages when it comes to time and efforts associated with changing the existing coding language.

Besides, the simplicity of Kotlin makes it incredibly easy for developers to learn and code. If you are familiar with Java, you can easily write codes in Kotlin. Also, you can easily convert Java codes into Kotlin. You just need IntelliJ or Android studio, and you're good to convert Java to Kotlin. That's why so many Android development projects are being shifted to Kotlin.