Kotlin Rising

According to the latest Tiobe index, new language and rising star Kotlin has broken the top 50 programming languages and now sits at number 43.

Other notables in the top 50 are Rust at #37, and Scala at #30.

Kotlin is a statically typed language that runs on multiple platforms, including the JVM, and Android.

In episode 8 of Java News and Code, we told you how Android Studio has announced first class support for Kotlin, indicating the language is gaining a foothold in the mainstream.

To learn more about Kotlin, visit the Kotlinlang.org page, and click on Try Kotlin.

According to the index, Kotlin is “the hot new thing” and has jumped into the top 50 since the index last came out in May.

Java still sits atop the list with almost 14 1/2%, more than double that of its closest rival, C, which sits at about 6.85%.

But how is this Index assembled? On this page, you can see the methodology behind the index.

In essence, it boils down to the number of hits from a query of the programming language in question against the top 25 search engines, as defined by

To qualify as a “programming language” tracked by the index, it must meet the following criteria:

* Its own Wikipedia page that states it is a programming language,
* It must be Turing complete, and
* It must have at least 500 hits in a Google search

Finally, the ratings are compiled as shown by this formula at the bottom of the page.

The Tiobe index is published every month.

Java 9 Release Date Pushed (Again)

If you’re wondering what is happening with Java 9, you’re not alone. On May 30th, Java 9 spec lead Mark Reinhold proposed an 8 week push of the General Availability date for Java 9. In this email to the jdk9-dev mailing list, Reinhold said the extra time was due to “…the additional time required to move through the [Java Community Process]”

After receiving no objections, he recorded the new GA date as September 21st, 2017.

As you probably know, Java 9 has been plagued by delays. The original GA release date for Java 9 was supposed to be in July of this year.

You may recall in May Project Jigsaw was handed a NO vote by the Java Community Process Executive Committee.

An updated spec was resubmitted by the Expert Group for a reconsideration balloe, and on June 26th, the reconsideration ballot for Project Jigsaw (a.k.a., JSR 376) was approved by the JCP Executive Committee.

On June 22nd, build 175 was released as the Initial Release Candidate. At this point only critical bugs will be fixed as the current Java 9 release date nears.

Java 9 Migration Issues

If you’ve attempted to migrate your code to Java 9, and have run into issues, you are not alone.

This article at Jaxenter points out there are known issues with Java 9, and also points to a site put together by CodeFX blogger Nicolai Parlog.

Aside from having an incredibly cool Twitter profile pic, and having an awesome blog at CodeFX.org, Parlog has put together a Github repository as a collector to aggregate code that works fine with Java 8, but breaks with Java 9.

Parlog says in the repo’s README that the purpose of the site is not to judge, but rather just to talk about what breaks in Java 9.

We talk a lot about Java 9, and we’re all excited about it. But the elephant in the room is that there will be issues, and the sooner we can acknowledge them, the sooner we can begin to fix them.

Among the issues currently listed on the site are:

• XML Transformation,
• Font scaling, and
• The Maven JAXB2 plugin

But at the top of the list are Compiler issues. And in today’s code talkthrough, we’ll look at these compiler issues.

I’ll be using my Mac to run the code with Java 8, and I’ll use a Docker container environment to run the Java 9 code.

To follow along with the video, you should have JDK 8 and Docker installed on your computer. To run the Java 9 code, you need a Docker sandbox with JDK 9 installed as well.

Check out episode 4 of Java News and Code, where I show you how to create a Docker sandbox for playing around with Java 9, without having to install JDK 9 natively on your computer.

Credits

Music:

Slay Well by Gunnar Olsen, YouTube Audio Library (Free to use for commercial purposes, no attribution required), see YouTube Terms of Service and this YouTube support article for details.

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