How to write Android Programs in Python?

Should I learn Clojure for Android programming?

• I'd like to get into Android programming, but every time I play with it, I find it full of verbose Java bureaucracy. I'd like to work with a nice modern, higher-level language (I'm mainly using CoffeeScript / Python these days). Would it be worth me learning Clojure to do Android programming? By this, I mean two things: Can you write Android apps. in Clojure at all--is the tooling there? Does Clojure buy you anything in the Android world or will I still be making the same long sequence of imperative calls to the same Java libraries that I'd be doing in Java? i.e. for this kind of application there isn't much "compression" in Clojure compared to Java.

• Answer:

  Clojure could be used successfully on Android, though the one should target the latest devices for best performance. On the level of Android OS interop Clojure is not introducing something special - you'll have to code all the same things as you would with plain Java. So the consideration of using Clojure should be made depending of your need and passion to more abstract language features as immutability, functionality etc. There are plenty of apps in the Android Market already, including some games build on GDX library + Clojure. (The tutorial by one of the authors could be found here https://github.com/thomas-villagers/clojurelibgdx) More general Android Clojure tutors could be googled.