Wednesday October 3rd the local Sacramento Groovy Users (sacgru.com) group will be hosting Andrey Breslav, lead language designer working on Project Kotlin at JetBrains.  Additional information can be find at sacgru.com or on google+ or the hacklabs meetup group.  The talk will be from 6:30 until 9:00-ish at Quilogy/Aspect:1300 National Dr Suite 180 Sacramento, CA 95834.

Project Kotlin (Image by: Jetbrains) Kotlin: Making the Java Platform a Better Place - Andrey Breslav

Abstract:

Kotlin is a modern statically typed language targeting JVM and JavaScript and intended for industrial use. The main goal behind this project is to create a language that would be a good tool for developers, i.e. will be safe, concise, flexible, 100% Java-compatible and well-supported by IDE and other tooling.

Kotlin is an open-source project developed by JetBrains, creators of IntelliJ IDEA and ReSharper, with the help of the community.

This talk gives an overview of the language in its present state and a perspective we have for the future.
Among other things, the following features will be covered:
* Static null-safety;
* Extension functions;
* Higher-order functions and type-safe builders;
* Smart casts: Kotlin's lightweight pattern matching;
* Making Java APIs better with Kotlin;
* Developing mixed Kotlin/Java projects.

To find out more about Kotlin, please refer to http://kotlin.jetbrains.org

Bio:
Andrey is the lead language designer working on Project Kotlin at JetBrains (http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/). He also works on making the Java language better, serving as a Java Community Process expert in a group for JSR-335 ("Project Lambda"). In what spare time is left he tries to make sure that his traveling is not all about work and teaches programming to high-school children. Used to teach OOP/Software Design at a university, but currently switched to speaking at software conferences such as JavaOne and Devoxx.