Android

I keep putting off doing anything on android because of java. I don't know java, and I don't really want to learn it. I suppose I will give in eventually, for android, but it will be grudgingly.

If you don't know Java, what do you have against it?

To some extent it's aesthetic. Java seems bureaucratic and verbose and just...clunky.

Part of this is just where I'm coming from. I started programming as a kid with basic, then assembly, like most programmers my age. Then pascal and C in college, got a job doing C++ and did that for a number of years. Dabbled in a working in php at the end of that, seemed a little sloppy as a language.

Then I just stopped programming for a long while. Did other things for a living, other things for hobbies. I'd burned out on programming because I wasn't doing the sorts of things I wanted to be doing with it.

Now I'm getting back into it and I just don't have any interest in Java. It feels like it's designed for slow, plodding steps, and writing code in it feels like I'm doing a lot of favors for the language rather than working on something interesting.

Right now I'm building small stuff in Python and dabbling in Clojure. Python lets me feel like the language is not at all a source of friction. I write the code as fast as I know what the code should be doing. Java does not feel like that at all. It's got its limitations, and there's certain things I'd drop back into C for if I wanted to do them, but Python is a language I can almost ignore while I'm using it, if that makes sense.

Clojure is a whole different animal, and I'm mostly using it to stretch my brain a bit. Get some concepts I'd like to learn.

I have to chime in that I also feel that Java is much as you said. I wanted to write some reflective code, and it took me an hour (admittedly doing it for the first time) and 57 lines of code. Frustrated, I did a mock up of it in python to see what the difference would be. It was only 12 lines, and much more intelligible. It was also much faster to write, but that isn't a fair comparison since the research into the function requirements had already been done.