Does anyone have any insight/source on why Java was a good choice for Android at the time it was created? I got lost in a sea of garbage while trying to find anything about that. I would like to understand why Java and not something else.
And even though Guido is pretty laid back, that is one time I vividly remember he got emotional and said it was "a political decision". But it wasn't the message, it was how he said. It seemed it was something he might have had a strong opinion about.
With that said, trying to port an app to Android maybe 2-3 years back, for me, it kind of redeemed Java a bit. Before that my exposure was EJBs, some web applications and the general FactoryFactoryManager type junk. Working on Adroid's Java I saw a better Java so to speak. (I've heard the opposite from others how they hated Eclipse and Android's Java API and docs, but that wasn't my experience).
Google just underestimated the idiocy of the US court system.
Actually I forgot when the Sun/Oracle sale happened. Android 1.0 was released before Oracle bought Sun. Though I suppose there was always the possibility of legal action by Sun.
Schmidt (being an ex-Sun executive) reached out to Sun to talk about an alliance.
http://icdn4.digitaltrends.com/image/google-schmidt-610x452....
"Nevertheless, describing his experience from his first startup, Danger, Rubin highlighted the benefits of using Java for a smartphone -- primarily the well-known brand name as well as compatibility being that it is a common language taught at universities worldwide."
I think because iPhone SDK was objective-C and it wasn't widely used. So Google might've thought they would've had an edge there
I did find a WSJ article with a quote from a Google engineer:
"We have been over a bunch of these [alternatives to Java] and think they all suck," the Google email continued, according to the transcript, adding, "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java." [0]
[0]http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119035202045764826...
"As Oracle tells it, Google was in a mad rush to get its operating system to market before competing platforms could take hold. It chose to use Java because there were already millions of programmers familiar with the language."
It's the 8th paragraph counting from the bottom up.
Like, the .net core was opensourced just last year, and even the .net micro for resource constrained devices was opensourced in 2010, 2 years after first android device existed.
I am not sure how usefull would using mono have been in this case.
On the other hand, I would agree that C# 3.0 with its support for lambdas, LINQ, ability to just use 'var' for local variable declaration, e.t.c looks like a much nicer language that what Java 6 SE was.