I was recently faced with the perplexing problem of making Spring and MongoDB serialize/deserialize a polymorphic class. Initially, it seemed like a simple task, but it proved to be more complicated than anticipated. Allow me to share my solution.

Here we go again with a new article derived from my work notes. As you already know, I am rewriting a backend application in Kotlin and — in the process — I am improving all the horrors of legacy code I can find. In this article, we will look at one critical aspect of software development (especially for REST applications): the documentation.

In the last week I converted a medium-sized legacy Java/Spring codebase to Kotlin. In this article I’ll discuss the pro and the challenges I faced during this transition.

Kotlin is a really sweet language. It is the perfect thing in between a “super-powerful and but difficult language” like Rust or Modern C++, and a “super-easy but that seems to be designed in the 80s” like Go. With the upcoming release on Kotlin Native, then, you can even ditch the JVM!

However, while IntelliJ is a great IDE, often I do not like to rely on big IDEs — especially when VSCode works perfectly well for 90% of my use cases. Therefore, it is time to see if and how I can use Kotlin in VS Code (and see what is missing).

In this year top-5 promising languages list, I put Kotlin in fifth place among the languages that you should definitely check in 2017. This week Google I\O announced that Kotlin is now an officially supported language for Android Development. I like to be right in my forecast. However, I need to be honest. Back then, I didn’t know well why I put it there. I just had some kind of ethereal intuition.

In the article I wrote:

Some days ago, I was cleaning my Code folder from old snippets and test projects when I found an old Clojure package I did to test some Clojure feature. I remember that I kept the project sleeping in my Code folder because I thought that it would come in handy when Clojure 1.9 would be released. However, I left that project stub back in February 2016, more than a year ago. That raise the question: where is Clojure 1.9?

Another year, another 5 promising programming languages you should keep an eye on in 2017. As usual, I’d like to write the warning I put here every year: in this list, you will not find programming languages for hiring purposes, but for very long-time investments and for pure programming fetish.

So, now that you know what I am talking about, here we go with the top 5 for 2017.

Top 5 Promising Programming Languages for 2017

Rust