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.
I sincerely believe that using BlueJ for teaching university-level programming is not a good idea. Students leave first year with a poor grasp of the programming ecosystem and have to catch up in second year. In fact, this course never teaches students how to compile and test code properly. The majority of students in 2nd year students (in my experience) have little to no practical ability to program. It also sets a poor precedent for future years, who believes that all programming should be so hand-holdy. Please feel free to contact me about this.