Almost everyone wants the same thing: they want to program apps for Android, but they don't want to use Java.

The site seems to be choking; you can catch a syndicated copy over on http://scheme.dk/planet/.

Neat stuff!

I've always wanted to learn Common Lisp or Scheme. This is a great motivator for me -- I love the idea of Android, and I hate having to use Java.

Does anyone here have good beginner books on Scheme? I'm thinking long-term; I don't expect functional mastery overnight.

Maybe "How To Design Programs"? (http://www.htdp.org/) I'm not sure if "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" qualifies as a beginner's text, but that's also available online (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/).

There's also "Scheme and the Art of Programming" and "The Little Schemer".

Nice, I wondered how long it would be until other JVM languages started getting ported to Android's Dalvik.

One barrier many JVM-hosted languages (including JRuby) are quickly coming up against when targeting Dalvik is the incompatible DEX bytecode format. Pure interpreters are fine, since they don't do any runtime bytecode emission, but the faster, more mature implementations tend to compile their source to bytecode at runtime. That won't work on Dalvik, since the Java bytecode->DEX translation tool is only available on a system running the SDK, not the handset itself.

One solution to this would be to create a self-hosting Dalvik DEX translator, so that apps running on an Android device could generate bytecode on the fly; another would be to switch to pre-compilation of your JVM-hosted language, with all runtime code evaluation handled via a simple interpreter.

An interesting example of the second type is Scala -- the Scala compiler generates class files directly, which can then be converted for use in Dalvik on the development host. It won't give you the runtime dynamism of a Scheme or JRuby environment, but it will at least spare you from having to write plain Java.