I picked up a Dev Phone 1 (G1 / HTC Dream) last week, knowing full well that more refined devices are in the pipeline. I'll probably replace it for day to day usage in the not so distant future, but it'll stay relevant as a lowest common denominator for app development and testing.
The iPhone EULA (or maybe app store agreements) prohibit scripting and interpreting, but if you have a jailbroken one you can install Python (search for Python in Cydia).
Coding using the iPhone keyboard isn't much fun, and as it's unsupported there are limited APIs - but there is a Python/Objective-C package, and a sample GUI app which loads a long list from a data provider (with full scrolling), and with a jailbroken phone and SSH, you can upload and edit remotely and so on.
I wish the iPhone supported Bluetooth keyboards (or some form of external keyboard). It would make using SSH and such much more pleasant. Maybe someone will use the external peripheral framework in OS 3.0 to add an external keyboard. I've seen one hack that did add a keyboard.
Does either of the Android phones support Bluetooth keyboards?
Android doesn't yet support the bluetooth profile you'd need to pair with a keyboard. I hope that full bluetooth support will be in an Android update later this year, but I don't think anything definite has been announced.
PhoneGap will let let you develop with HTML/Javascript/CSS, but compile to native code. That's the closest I know of. Bonus: it will also compile to android (basically a webkit wrapper).
Hmm. Python has been available for Symbian/S60 for at least five years. Surely there are interactive scripting environments on Windows Mobile as well. What makes ASE special?
I haven't tried it, but I don't see why not... The project's feature list mentions that there's a console for interactive development.
Of course Symbian is one of those old-fashioned operating systems with a user-accessible file system, so one can also just open a text editor, write a script, save it as a file and run it the PyS60 script shell.
Well, that sort of blows the raison d'etre for Hecl's Android port out of the water, but it's really cool to see nonetheless, and one of the reasons why Android is a great platform for those who want to hack on stuff.
Actually, I think Hecl will still be useful for some things: it compiles directly to dalvik bytecode, whereas these are native processes which are launched/managed/interacted with via jsonrpc.
I really thought that they'd make versions of these languages that would compile to Dalvik bytecode, so that people weren't restricted to writing Java Android apps. Makes sense given it's a custom VM, right? Guess we're halfway there now.
I think you could definitely do that with Lua (I know someone has ported it to J2ME), and Javascript. Python and Ruby are harder, because they are bigger, and their Java implementations use lots of more 'advanced' stuff like reflection and bytecode generation that are not going to fly on Dalvik.
