This Week I Learned: Kotlin’s when is neat [2022–02–28]

I’m learning Kotlin, and I the when expression syntax strikes me as really neat. It reads fluently, it’s compact and reveals complexity gracefully.

Some points that I find especially pleasing:

• the -> feels like the nicest syntaxes of functional programming
• the else is optional if the conditions exhaustively test all values
• my IDE complains if I omit the else and I haven’t tested all values, and otherwise let’s me omit it
• multiple values can be grouped together by putting commas between them
• in and is read especially fluently (when foo in bah…)

Conditions and loops | Kotlin