magicseeker

I don't think that's quite I'm saying. I'm not put off by the platform because of the initial incarnation of the language I still want an Android phone and expect to write programs for it at some point. Instead, I'm saying that I'm put off by the contest because of the rules - which is something different.

Exactly. And I'd wonder if some sort of direct Scala -> Dalvik compilation could work around some of the crufty bits of Scala (like its lack of proper tail recursion) and of Android (like all of the performance tuning suggestions in the SDK documentation).

I was pretty interested in the contest until I read the T&C and learned that all submissions had to be written in Java. I think that shows a lack of imagination on Google's part. A lot of cool applications could have been made by people using other JVM-targeting languages (JRuby, Jython, Scala, Cal, Javascript, etc.). I was thinking of using it as a Scala-learning exercise myself. Ah, well...