Android L with the Material design language looks very attractive. But I really dislike the Java/XML combo for development.<p>So, anyone tried the alt-Java's for coding Android apps: Kotlin, Xtend, Scala etc.<p>Or even Xamarin or QT/QML.<p>P.S With ART, I hoped Google were moving away from Java and would bless one of the alt-Java syntaxes and eventually cut-out Java and evolve ART independently. But apparently not.
This here explains why they can't move to other languages overnight:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N3XyVkAP8nmWjASz8L_OjjnjVKxgeVBjIsTr5qIUcA4/preview?sle=true" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N3XyVkAP8nmWjASz8L_Ojjnj...</a><p>They basically need to rewrite Android from scratch, and then find a way to make all old Java apps compatible with the new Android, too, but I'm guessing that should be easier with ART available.
C# and/or F# + Xamarin: <a href="http://fwaris.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/xamarin-f-experience-report/" rel="nofollow">http://fwaris.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/xamarin-f-experience-...</a><p>(I have not yet tried, but am going to)<p>PS: why hate XML? It has its place. JSON is not meant to be extensible and it's a data, not mark-up language.
People use Scala and it works pretty well.<p>Here is a mailing list full of those people: <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scala-on-android" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scala-on-android</a>