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Comment by technomancy | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical towards the ASE approach; Tim Bray's post on the subject has a good overview of the challenges inherent in getting nicer languages working for Android apps: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/28/Ruby-and-P...

My money is on Mirah, a new fast, lightweight JVM language that feels like Ruby but compiles to identical-to-Java bytecode: https://github.com/mirah/pindah I don't think shoehorning existing runtimes is a suitable long-term approach.

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Agreed. Something like Mirah, designed to run the the Java ecosystem from the ground up, makes more sense and brings along far less baggage. You lose the Python libraries if you go this route but I suspect you're mostly just going to be gluing together bits of the Android APIs anyway so it's less of a loss.

I am currently pulling my hair out just trying to get various activities to send stuff between each other. Doing this stuff in Javascript is so much easier with JSON and it's too bad there is no JSON equivalent for Java and the static typing doesn't help matters either so I can't wait until there is another option other than Java for writing applications.

actually there's a JSON library with the Android SDK ... check out this great document that describes a bare bones webview based android development path, sort of like phonegap but with thinner gloves: http://itp.nyu.edu/~sve204/mobilemedia_spring10/androidWebVi...

It's funny. Half the time people claim Android's static typing is an advantage vs iOS and half the time people instead really hate it.

I have to say that now that I'm slowly getting over the verbosity of Objective-C I'm finding ansi C + a dynamic messaging layer to be a pretty nice combination on iOS. It looks like I'd have to work both below Java with the NDK (painful) and above it with some kind of scripting layer to get similar speed + flexibility on Android.

I started programming in dynamic languages like Javascript and Ruby so I'm really hating it. I have no idea how people manage to get anything done in Java. I was hoping generics would help me out but when I started using them all of a sudden interfaces started to pollute everything. I really wish palm/hp had more competent management because their webOS operating system is light years ahead of android/iOS.

I've lived both worlds. Java is strong where you have a large codebase with a team working on it. Even more if you have multiple versions of your platform running in different places and need to manage the code forward. Static typing is really useful for this stuff. I think single-person teams, or very-well-gelled small teams (who can all buy into a single syntactic style) are far more effective with dynamic languages.

Good point. Context is everything for language choice.

Weird nobody else mentioned ruboto: https://github.com/ruboto/ruboto-core

It even has an app for android (https://market.android.com/details?id=org.ruboto.irb), which works very well, even with OpenGL.

Ruboto still seems to have a few problems. According to the current faq on github[1], a "hello world" app currently takes over 3 mb compressed, and takes 10 seconds or so to start. (They're working on it.) So it works, but not really well yet.

[1] https://github.com/ruboto/ruboto-core/wiki/FAQ

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