Interview and Q&A: Java and Kotlin evolution. What awaits us?

Day 1 /  / Track 1  /  RU

Java is evolving. Every six months we see some new features, such as text blocks, sealed classes, records, switch instanceof — all those conveniences that were previously available only to users of other, more modern languages on the JVM, for example, Kotlin.

What will Kotlin do? Sit and wait to hope for conveniences where Java can never catch up, or will it continue to move forward? What else can be improved in a language that has grown thanks to a massive simplification of the amount of water that has to be written in Java code? Is there a stock? What do programmers suffer from and where can a programming language improve their lives?

In the beginning, we will look at a quick summary of the differences between Java and Kotlin where Java is already closing its gap, where it plans to do so, where Kotlin has a big fundamental gap, and where it can still grow.


Speakers

Roman Elizarov
JetBrains

Roman Elizarov is Project Lead for Kotlin at JetBrains, where he is focused on future Kotlin language features. His main contribution is the design of Kotlin coroutines and development of Kotlin coroutines library.

In 2000 Roman Elizarov had graduated from St. Petersburg ITMO and started his career as a professional software developer. During his undergraduate study he participated in International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC). Since 1997 and until now Roman serves as a Chief Judge of Northern Eurasia Region of ICPC. He also maintains his academic ties and now teaches a course on concurrent and distributed programming at ITMO. Roman Elizarov had worked for most of his career at Devexperts, where he designed and developed high-performance trading software for leading brokerage firms and market data delivery services that routinely handle millions of events per second. He is an expert in Java and JVM, particularly in concurrency, real-time data processing, algorithms, and performance optimizations for modern architectures.

Invited Experts

Anton Arhipov
JetBrains

Anton is a Developer Advocate at JetBrains in the Kotlin project and "Razbor poletov" podcast resident. Professional interests include programming languages, middleware, and developer tooling.

Aleksey Stukalov
Haulmont

Since 2008, Aleksey has been working in the field of process automation in the oil and gas industry. As a project manager and technical leader, he participated in the full development cycle of large and medium-sized systems from the stage of collecting requirements to commissioning. He also leads a development team of 50 or more people. Since the end of 2014, he has taken the position of Project Director at HAULMONT. Since 2015, the main focus has been the development of the CUBA platform, which has gone from an unknown framework to a world-recognized product with a community of tens of thousands of developers. At the moment, Alexey is in charge of DevRel in the company, and also heads the R&D department.