Kotlin Koans—Part 18

This portion of the Kotlin Koans tutorial deals with sorting a collection functionally. As usual with Kotlin, this wasn’t a very difficult problem. As a matter of fact, it’s only one line of code.

fun Shop.getCustomersSortedByNumberOfOrders(): List {
    return customers.sortedBy { it.orders.size }
}

We basically just call the sortedBy method and place the property we want to sort by inside of the curly braces { }. In this case, I wanted to sort by the number of orders my hypothetical customer placed, so I used it.orders.size.

Just for kicks, I decided to try this in Java 8 to see the difference.

public static List getCustomersSortedByNumberOfOrders(Shop shop){
    return shop.getCustomers()
            .stream()
            .sorted(Comparator.comparingInt(customer -> customer.getOrders().size()))
            .collect(Collectors.toList());
}

Once again, we can do the same thing in Java that we can do in Kotlin at the expense of more verbosity. Also, I think in this case, the Java approach is more difficult to learn and more prone to errors since we are chaining a bunch of functions together to achieve the same result that we can do in one line of Kotlin code.

You can click here to see Part 17