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Comment by bicx | Hacker News Reader

Wish Android would move in this direction. We're stuck in a 1.6 API for the most part.

I was confused by this comment, because the last time I heard Android was on a 1.5 equivalent. But sure enough as of ADT 22.6.0 (March 2014) some Java 1.7 features were added: http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html

Android is 1.6 equivalent with some of the syntactic sugar of Java 1.7, but none of the Java 7 or 8 APIs (NIO, new date library, optionals, lambdas, etc).

Unfortunately the legal fight between Oracle & Google has really made me doubt that the cool new language features will be coming any time soon to Android.

Google is not going to try and advance Java development. They should just deprecate it and switch to Go. But right now they seem stuck in the middle, not doing either.

> They should just deprecate it and switch to Go

That would be a step backward, we really need generics and a reasonable support for exceptions on Android (or any large scale system, for that matter).

Go is a fine language at the system level or to replace Ruby/Python scripts but that's about it.

I hope they don't. Go seems like a mediocre language at best: in no way obviously better than Java. Given that they already forked the JVM and added lots of custom class libraries, I'd rather they just forked Java properly and renamed it instead, or switched to another JVM compatible language. Go would have no benefits at all.

I really hope they don't. Go is really good for some things, but true object-oriented languages are great for designing and controlling UIs.

Hm, I think the way Go uses interfaces would actually be ideal for manipulation of UI.

Go also has true closures and easy concurrency support, both of which are very handy in UI development.

My beef with Go is weak web-programming and prototyping support and immature libraries. I'm surprised there's been so much uptake in the Ruby/Python communities, which are very strong in those areas, but I guess Ruby/Python are now being used outside their original domains and those use-cases are pretty ripe for a language like Go.

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