Kotlin Koans—Part 12

The last part of the Kotlin Koans tutorial had me use Object Expressions to sort an ArrayList. I observed that this could have been done with a lambda expression and I was correct.

This portion of the tutorial discusses implementing an interface with one abstract method. Kotlin calls such interfaces a SAM interface (Single Abstract Method). Whenever a developer is working with a SAM interface, they are free to use a lambda expression rather than an Object Expression.

Here is the Kotlin code that uses a lambda expression

fun task11(): List {
    val arrayList = arrayListOf(1, 5, 2)
    Collections.sort(arrayList, { x, y -> y.compareTo(x) })
    return arrayList
}

I should point out that Java 8 supports lambda expressions now also. Java calls SAM interfaces Functional interfaces. You can even add a @Functional annotation to such interfaces in Java.

I don’t see any huge advantage to Kotlin lambdas over Java ones at this point. Of course, Android developers may appreciate Kotlin’s lambda support.

You can view part 11 here.