Kotlin Day

I finished the odyssey I began in January -- to re-solve every Advent of Code puzzle in a new programming language (Kotlin). I'm now an elite member of the 800 star club.

Kotlin is a very pleasant language to work with, especially when paired with IntelliJ IDEA which pushes you towards writing idiomatic Kotlin code instead of just porting Java styles into Kotlin. My Kotlin solutions generally ran a little faster than my Java solutions (although I tried to solve each puzzle from scratch so my approach was different many times). Conversely, compiling felt a little slower than in Java, which won't be good for competing in my company on the tiny puzzles earlier in the month. Either way, I'm able to write much more concise, readable code which is worth everything when it was debugging time.

Apart from with, I never really found a good use for Kotlin scope functions. They just seem like an overlapping set of ways to write cool-looking code that will confuse future maintainers.

Next up on my project list is to learn Spanish!