One project I worked on had 10 different languages. That was rough. But even your basic full stack web application is usually 5 languages: SQL, a backend language, HTML, CSS and JS. Usually some wheel reinventing frameworks thrown in for good measure. 5 languages is light these days.
I work in Java, Golang, Python, with Helm, CircleCI, bash scripts, Makefiles, Terraform, and Terragrunt for testing and deployment. There are other teams handling the C++ and SQL (plus whatever dark magic QA uses).
This is literally how this all started for us lol. Senior wanted to try to migrate everything to Kotlin in our project. Migration never finished. Now one of our major repos is just half Kotlin half Java. Devs on our team learn Kotlin by unexpectedly encountering it when they need to touch that code.
Maybe it’s because I know both languages but is that really a big issue for people? The interop is great, and kotlin is very readable, so the cost of context switching between the two is miniscule.
Some people have an extreme aversion to learning new things though. I feel that holding yourself to the standards and limits of your lowest performers isn’t a great thing.
Doesn’t Kotlin has interoperability with Java? I didn’t used it much yet but I’m about to in a few months. Is it that difficult to just refactor things to Kotlin when you need to change something in the project? I’m asking because I just can’t work with verbose languages and would prefer Kotlin to Java everyday.
The interoperability is both a blessing and a curse imo since it let us half-ass the integration by leaving a bunch of Java code unconverted. I could start refactoring everything but then my team would stop reviewing my PRs due to the diff size (and then my manager would eventually find out that I’ve been using up work time doing this instead of shipping features during crunch week).
I really much prefer Kotlin to Java. I just wish my team had actually had a commitment to it instead of just sorta using it with no migration plan.
Sounds like you’re making progress, your devs are slowly learning a better language that will let them work faster and will soon be able to help port the rest of the codebase and then you can really accelerate when no one needs to touch or know Java.
I really hope so. Last code I reviewed was full of !! and companion objects trying to emulate Java static instead of top-level consts. Even I’m still trying to figure out what idiomatic Kotlin looks like. We got a ways to go…
The XKCD Standards comic writ large. There are 17 competing standards. -> “Hey, we should make a standard to unite all these disparate standards.” -> There are now 18 competing standards.
Lots of little quality of life things. For instance, in Kotlin types can be marked nullable or not. When you are passing a potential null into a non-nullable argument, the compiler raises an error.
But if you had already checked earlier in scope whether or not the value was null, the compiler remembers that the value is guaranteed not to be null and won’t blow up.
Same for other typechecks. Once you have asserted that a value is a given type, you don’t need to cast it everywhere else. The compiler will remember.
Cargo is really simple, which is great, but also limiting. Maven is much more complex, but for good reason - there’s use cases, especially around multi-artifact projects and version sharing, where cargo would require either some glue or you run into some interesting edge cases. Usually, Rust isn’t used for the kinds of big, wacky projects with a million dependencies that companies write in Java/Kotlin, so those kinds of use cases are considered more unusual.
Gradle, in my opinion, makes itself complex because it’s all code, is very brittle, and several of its features just don’t work right and require workarounds. When it works, it builds fast and it works well, but getting it to work, and how often you have to get it to work again…not worth it.
That one dude still using Delphi is getting screwed.
Also, these salary numbers seem… real low. I get that it’s the median so maybe a huge number of overseas engineers are pulling the results down but in my neck of the woods 105K is less than what we pay juniors.
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