Kotlin Thursdays: Kotlin Koans with Ben Rodriguez

@apichamion  

Part 1 here: https://codetown.com/group/kotlin/forum/topics/kotlin-thursdays-kot...

Welcome, all to another week of Kotlin Thursdays. In this week we are going to dive deeper into Kotlin Koans and like all koans, this one is going to get more difficult. This week we are going to cover default arguments, lambdas, strings and data classes. These koans are a great way to get into functional programming and learn about the kotlin syntax.

Within default arguments, we are going to you will see how kotlin can take declare an argument at the beginning of the function. Using this notation at the beginning of the function for some makes the code easier to read and support. Having the declarations at the top also reduces the lines of code so there is less sifting through lines. I learned how to do this type of declarations earlier and I always preferred that style.

Lambdas are still confusing to me. My first introduction into lambdas was playing with them on Amazon Web Services. I then saw that lambdas popped up in Java 7 and 8. I’m glad I can see them again here. I was a little confused about the “it” convention which confused me. When I read through the function from right to left the use of ‘it” makes perfect sense.

Strings glorious strings yes I sing this out loud often. This koan teaches us about string literals and string templates and how to use them. I weird but for some reason, this koan makes me happy. I think when I started down my Kotlin journey this is where things started making sense to me.

The last koan we explore is the data class. Within the data class koan we see some the readability of Kotlin shine. We are given a class in java and then rewriting the class in kotlin and as you might have guess writing in Kotlin is cleaner.

I hope you enjoy the Kotlin Thursdays episode!

For this walkthrough, you will need to install the EduTools plugin into IntelliJ!

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/education/install-edutools-plugin.html?section=IntelliJ%20IDEA

Here is another overview of what we are doing -   

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/education/learner-start-guide.html?s...

Websites and Courses

Think of these resources as supplemental if you happen to be more curious.  We always encourage looking into documentation for things you use!

• Udemy “Kotlin for Beginners: Learn Programming With Kotlin”: https://www.udemy.com/kotlin-cou...
• Treehouse ”Kotlin for Java Developers”: https://teamtreehouse.com/librar...
• Pluralsight “Kotlin Fundamentals”: https://www.pluralsight.com/cour...
• Most popular Kotlin projects, libraries and other frameworks: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reso...,
• Kotlin Koans: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/koans.html
• Coursera "Kotlin for Java Developers": https://www.coursera.org/learn/kotlin-for-java-developers

Books

• Kotlin in Action by “Dmitry Jemerov and Svetlana Isakova”
• Hands on Microservices with Kotlin by “Juan Antonio Medina Iglesias”