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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the author understands why Java is the language in the first place - there is an army of developers who knows how to use Java. Yeah, it might not be the best language ever, but neither is C++ and neither is Scala.

For what Google is doing their choices were basically C++ or Java, there is no other embedded, performant option that hits mass quantities of developers worldwide. Every other language is either too niche, or not performant enough, or doesn't have the features you would want. Sure, I guess they could have done C#, but I'm pretty sure Google hates Microsoft, so that's not going to happen.

iOS only has Objective-C because of NextStep and OS X. Otherwise, it could very easily have had C++ or Java. Blackberry ended up with C++ for their native toolkit.

Has there been a significant mobile platform that wasn't C++ or Java that doesn't have some historical reason like Obj-C has behind it?

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I think WebOS was going to use JavaScript.

The thing about Java and C++ is that they themselves are around for historical reasons. Far better languages have already been proven out. But, it will take a major industry player to move the masses forward on this. Apple's Swift effort gives hope on this.

> Far better languages have already been proven out

For what they do, C and C++ don't really have serious challengers yet, not that there aren't some promising contenders.

> For what they do, C and C++ don't really have serious challengers yet

Only if you define "what they do" in a way that makes that a trivial tautology (e.g., as "things for which C and C++ don;t really have serious challengers"). Over time, a lot of serious challengers have arisen and competed with (and even displaced) C and C++ in areas where those languages have been widely used. There may still be areas where they don't have serious competition, but those areas keep getting smaller.

When I say proven out, I don't mean in the sense of being widely used; I mean academically. In other words, I am trying to say that it's not a research problem, it's a problem of, say, engineering and marketing to bring it to reality. Cool language features are well established in academia (but tend not to go anywhere due to entrenchment and industry complacency – in that sense I would agree that they aren't 'proven').

If Google says "This is the second official lanuage for Android" I bet any adoption issues would go away a la Swift.

Google would need to do this internally. Good luck convincing the 10,000 developers inside of Google stop using Java. Sure, they aren't all on Android, and there are plenty of people using Go, or Dart, or Python, but moving a company culture that large away from Java doesn't happen overnight.

Obj-C to Swift won't happen overnight at Apple either, but it is much more likely to happen because they've been gradually working towards it for years now with LLVM and such.

Indeed. Developers look to Google to set an example, but it seems that Google itself is looking to developers to set an example. Hence we have a circular pattern of language adoption :) But it doesn't have to be that way.

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