What's this about? The year 2025 is almost over, so that means that it has been a bit over a decade since my old colleague Filippo gave a presentation to the development team of ScienceDirect covering the merits of the Kotlin programming language. So, it's about time that I had a proper go at using it. This blog post is intended to trace what the experience has been like, covering surprises that I encounter along the way. Getting started The programming language that I am most experienced with is Java, so I have chosen to try out implementing some functionality in Kotlin from a recent hobby project that I developed in Java involving spinning up a database in a Docker container and running some queries. JVM version support IntelliJ IDEA includes some automation for creating a new project, so I selected the relevant options to use the latest LTS version of the Java virtual machine with Spring Boot, Kotlin, Postgresql and Test containers. After a few seconds I had a new project i...
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