
Other Android Languages - fogus
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/28/Ruby-and-Python-on-Android
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towndrunk
I would like to use Objective-c so I can leverage most of the iPhone code and
libraries I have. I know it's looked down upon but I have become productive in
objective-c.

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rbanffy
The problem is not Objective C but the classes that compose the iOS framework.

Perhaps the GNUStep people could help porting some (or you could help them).

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pierrefar
An interesting twist to this, although technically not what he stated were the
objectives, are tools like Phonegap and Titanium: you write HTML and JS that
gets wrapped up in webkit and it works like a "real" Android (and iPhone) app.
But as I said, nowhere near as low level as he wanted.

There is also a Ruby-based project but I can't remember its name.

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silversmith
The ruby based project would most likely be Rhomobile Rhodes.

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pierrefar
Yes, that's it. Thanks.

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davidw
Hecl runs ok on Android, although he talks about Python and Ruby, so that
excludes us. Oh well...

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draegtun
Yes the article is a bit blinkered especially when _Perl, Lua, BeanShell,
JavaScript, Tcl, and shell_ are already available options on Android (along
with Python & JRuby): <http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/>

~~~
msg
He talks about this specifically.

"JRuby also appears in Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A), formerly the
Android Scripting Environment, of which more later."

"But maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree; both Python and Ruby are written
in C and run well on Linux boxes, which is what Android devices are. In fact
CPython has already been ported to Android as part of SL4A; I can’t imagine
that Ruby would be that much harder. Also, I’m confident that they’d start up
quickly and run acceptably fast."

"SL4A · Whatever the right answer is, some of the work done in what we used to
call the Android Scripting Environment will surely go into it. They’re not
trying to solve the same problem I am; they want to empower people to knock
off little scripts right there on the phone; which is interesting, but I want
to write big substantial Android apps using the nice tools on my computer with
effortless built-in access to all those nice Android APIs. ¶

But they’ve cracked some very nontrivial porting nuts and figured out one
instructive way to expose Android’s APIs to whatever programming language
comes along."

~~~
draegtun
Yes thats why I put Python & JRuby in brackets. But there was no mention about
any of the other languages already working on Android as part of the SL4A.

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joubert
I wonder why Google chose Java in the first place, instead of a Python
runtime...

~~~
elblanco
Wasn't Android developed by another company that was then later acquired by
Google?

[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc20050817_0949_tc024.htm)

At the time, most mobile phone dev was done in Java (and probably still is
today). It seems natural to want to leverage those developers for the new OS
rather than have them learn a whole new skillset.

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joubert
duh. you're right; I forgot about that.

impressive then that in such a short period of time, Infinite Loop got so many
people to develop in an "obscure" language/SDK.

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Kilimanjaro
I'd love to use Javascript to code for Android.

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rcoder
You can already do this using Rhino, but it isn't a huge win without idiomatic
library wrappers that make the Android Java APIs a little less Java-ish.

~~~
jared314
And, hopefully, a little less c-ish at the same time.

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earl
I've gotten scala to work on the simulator and on a nexus one. It was an
enormously painful process, with many sets of contradictory and outdated
walkthroughs on the net and clearly very little people actually getting this
to work.

