<story><title>C&apos;mon, stop writing Java for Android</title><url>http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/5836463058/scala-a-better-java-for-android</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesbritt</author><text>&lt;i&gt;So what’s stopping you from using Scala for your Android app?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mirah.&lt;p&gt;While Mirah is still beta-ish I prefer it to Scala.  Maybe it&apos;s because I&apos;m already familiar with Ruby, but the &quot;multi paradigm&quot; (i.e. no paradigm) nature of Scala leaves me cold.  It&apos;s kinda-sorta OO, kinda-sorta functional.  But the functional part gives no guarantees of referential transparency or immutable state, so the killer value of FP is lost.&lt;p&gt;But, language rant aside, even if Scala were the cat&apos;s meow, you still have to include the Scala base libraries with every app.  Proguard may help, but it seems wasteful.&lt;p&gt;Mirah, OTOH, compiles down to straight-up JVM byte code. No supporting runtime libs are needed. Very slick.</text></comment>
<story><title>C&apos;mon, stop writing Java for Android</title><url>http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/5836463058/scala-a-better-java-for-android</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wccrawford</author><text>I&apos;m underwhelmed.  At that level, I find the Java version more readable.  (I know, I know, the horror.)&lt;p&gt;But to answer the question posed:  Community.  I started messing with Mirah, but there&apos;s just not much community yet.  Any questions you have is a new one.  And nobody knows the answer yet.  That&apos;s fine if you like figuring things out and have time...  But drop either of those and it&apos;s just a headache.</text></comment>