I am interested in Kotlin these days. A few days ago, I attended a Kotlin meetup in which Andrey Breslav* gave a presentation called Shoulders of Giants: Languages Kotlin learned from.

Andrey Breslav is well-known in the Kotlin community. He led the design and development of Kotlin at JetBrains for ten years.

The talk's title reminded me of another presentation with the same title I watched on YouTube. But it was about the Go language (Golang). That's interesting! Actually, the original quote is from the famous scientist Isaac Newton, who once said: If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

In this case, the Giants are the previous languages that inspired the new language. As Andrey pointed out: Originality does not serve any practical purpose by itself. Building on top of other people's ideas is a good thing.

Kotlin rests on the shoulders of Java, Scala, Python and C#. The efficiency of C language and the simplicity of Python inspired Golang.

Kotlin has various ways to perform loops, but the designers omitted the C-Style for loops:

  
    for (int i = 0; i<10; i++)
  

Instead, Golang relies only on the C-Style for loops. A more flexible version, to be precise.

Whatever your favourite language is, some giants' shoulders support it, and finding out who they are is exciting and instructive.

Useful links:

• Shoulders of Giants: Languages Kotlin learned from
• Go: building on the shoulders of giants and stepping on a few toes

- 14 Dec 2022 -