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.