I am very happy to announce that we – the Programming Education Tools group here at King’s – have started a collaboration with JetBrains to bring Kotlin to BlueJ.

BlueJ is one of the most popular IDEs for teaching programming and currently supports Java and Stride as programming languages.

Kotlin is a modern general purpose programming language developed and maintained by JetBrains, running on the JVM and fully interoperable with Java.

King’s and JetBrains have started a collaboration to implement support for Kotlin in BlueJ, with both organisations contributing developer time to the project. We expect beta versions to become available for testing in the Spring, and full support being released later this year.

If you are interested in keeping up to date with progress, check back here at a later time, or – if you are a teacher – sign up to the Blueroom, where we will keep members up to date with developments.