Android Scripting
This is cool to see, even though it will doubtless take away some market share from Hecl:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html
Importantly, I think it helps to establish that Android is the phone OS for those who want to be able to hack on stuff. With the Apple phones, you're not supposed to even run interpreters on them. Yuck.
In any case, I think that it still leaves some space for Hecl:
Their system uses natively compiled languages that use a JSON RPC system to talk. This makes managing them a bit trickier - Hecl is written entirely in Java and compiled as a 'native' Android application.
Hecl is very easy to embed, and doesn't carry around a lot of baggage.
Hecl is small - apparently this system clocks in at something like 12 megs! Hecl is something like 500K.
Another cool thing is that this is, like most everything that Google has done with Android, open source under the Apache license (the same one as Hecl), which means that if I get a free moment, I'll try grabbing some of their console code and integrating it to make a nice Hecl console for Android.
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about 1 hour later:
I think OpenMoko (rather than Android) is the phone OS for those who want to be able to hack on stuff. Android is another Google future profit centre.
about {{count}} hours later:
'foo': profit and open source are not exclusive. Android is very much open source. And combined with Google's marketing muscle, it actually has more than a snowball's chance in hell of being deployed on more than a few phones.
about {{count}} hours later:
Maybe... but OpenMoko just doesn't work. While my HTC DREAM works great and more than 50% of the code I'm running is open source. Yuk.
about {{count}} hours later:
David, this post's markup is broken, I had to look at the source to find the link to Google's blog.
about {{count}} hours later:
Sylvain - it was indeed, thanks for letting me know.
1 day later:
Are ther any prebuild hecl packages for android available yet?
1 day later:
Alexander, there should be a Hecl.apk in android/bin in svn.
{{count}} days later:
How did Lua get into the first wave of languages that are supported? Google decided to support Lua before it supported Ruby or Javascript?
In regards to hecl, I guess this is one of the negative when developing for some company's platform - the company itself might come up with something competitive.
All the same, right now, hecl is the only script language aimed that space that is derived from Java. That will probably have some benefits.
{{count}} days later:
Sorry for the multiple posts. Nothing showed up after I hit submit, nor was there a message (using FireFox 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.4).
{{count}} days later:
Lawrence, Google internally uses Python, so that was logical, and Lua is small and embeddable, so it was probably extremely easy to add.
Also, yes, I think the fact that Hecl is done in Java, and doesn't require any fancy RPC, any external executables, and is also fairly compact, are all points in its favor.
Sorry about the 'multiple post' thing. I'm not sure why that happens, but I have let the Typo guys know.