The material used during the talk (slides, etc.) can be found here_. On the 13th of June 2019 Sebastian Aigner, Education Advocate at JetBrains, visited to enlighten us about everything related to Kotlin.

.. _here: https://github.com/SebastianAigner/game-of-life-talk

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<style> .black {color:black} </style>

.. role:: black

In short, Kotlin is a concise programming language, designed to be used for multiple platforms and adhering to multiple paradigms.

For example, this is a “Hello world!” program written in Kotlin:

.. parsed-literal::

:black:fun main(){ :black:print("Hello world!") :black:}

On the one hand Kotlin is object-oriented, but on the other hand offering, amongst other features, higher-order functions, making the language functional as well. Furthermore, Kotlin is Null-Safe:

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:black:fun main(){ :black:val a : String? = null //a is a nullable String with value null :black:print(a?.length) :black:}

Thanks to Null-Safety the code above will compile and not crash at runtime.

Now for the multi-platform characteristic of Kotlin. One could write code for a project, which will then run on a desktop computer and then add to that same project a little more platform-specific code so one may run it on Android, iOS or in the browser.

All these and more features were not just explained, but also demonstrated in an extensive Live-Coding-Session by solving the Fizz-Buzz Test and making the Game of Life.

Even after the talk many questions on various details about Kotlin arose, which were eagerly answered. All that is left to say after such an informative and entertaining talk is we are happy we could once again welcome JetBrains to our university and we hope this will not be the last time, as some of us still need to complete their merchandise collection.