Creator of Spring: No desire to write Java | Talking Kotlin #138

Sebastian and Márton chat with Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework. Rod tells the story of how Spring was born more than two decades ago, and shares his recent journey of coming back to the JVM and discovering all the fun of being a newcomer to Kotlin. • Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development: Rod Johnson – http://www.amazon.com/Expert-One-One-Design-Development/dp/1861007841 • Oh the Places You'll Go! - https://spring.io/blog/2012/07/03/oh-the-places-you-ll-go • Shoulders of Giants: Languages Kotlin Learned From | Andrey Breslav - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z_K-hTTeqI • Revamping and Extending Kotlin's Type System | Ross Tate - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uNpmhHwkuQ • Scala in 2018 Keynote | Rod Johnson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBu6zmrZ_50 • But Java has pattern matching! | Alejandro Serrano Mena - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDoa42X-wQ • The origins of Spring - https://spring.io/blog/2012/07/03/oh-the-places-you-ll-go • Kotlin type system evolution - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uNpmhHwkuQ Hosts: Sebastian Aigner • Website - https://sebi.io/ •Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/sebi.io Márton Braun • Website - https://zsmb.co • Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/zsmb.co Guest: Rod Johnson • Twitter - https://x.com/springrod • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonroda/ 00:00 Intro 00:52 The origins of Spring 06:40 You need a business model 08:21 Consistency is key 09:39 Sustainable open source 14:22 Parallels with JetBrains and Kotlin 15:29 Rod’s journey around the JVM 20:48 Shoulders of giants 22:34 The newcomer experience 24:40 LLMs write great Kotlin 30:34 “You can start without great pain” 33:32: Extension functions 36:15 Too much magic? 37:56 Rod’s feature wishlist 39:37 Versioning and compatibility 41:19 Ecosystems and interop 43:34 Kotlin type system evolution 46:27 Kotlin with Spring 52:24 Learning Spring with Kotlin 54:46 Kotlin in 5 years? 1:00:39 Rod’s current work 1:03:58 Wrap-up #kotlin #spring #java