An important bit of TL;DR:

For those who, as did I, say "that's stupid! you have to install the Python for Android APK on the target device!", see http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/SharingScrip...

I can totally relate to the statement: "If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code in Eclipse, it would appear that you are out of luck when it comes to implementing your next project on Android." I've been attempting to educate myself about Android development for a side project. Dealing with Java has been an impediment, as my brain seems to grok scripting languages far more easily.

If its a less verbose language that you are looking for, you might want to checkout mirah (and pindah) -- https://github.com/mirah

I believe its still under heavy development, but really nice in that mirah can output dalvik bytecode.

http://pygame.org also has a pygame subset for android which includes a port of cpython. Not all modules are included though. Some python packages are missing, and some pygame modules are not included too. However it works well enough for most games.

Just create a directory called pygame on your sd card and put your code in there. No need to mess around with setting up java.

Stay tuned, we're nearly finished with a release that includes Python 2.7.1 and various other goodies.

SL4A is still the way to go if you want access to a significant portion of the Android API, though.

Does anyone know if it is possible to write JRuby android applications? It would seem a natural fit given Java etc etc. I do relate to the comment ""If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code" so I have been looking for a better way to do it. Though, I have lately resigned myself to the fact that I may well have to write Java again...

As an aside...does anyone have experience with PhoneGap or Appcelerator? Wondering about experiences with those approaches (both positive and negative).

You might want to check out Ruboto. I haven't used it yet, but it seems to allow you to do exactly what you want, i.e. write full Android apps using JRuby. I've heard there's a significant performance penalty, though.

http://ruboto.org/

I've also heard of people having success using Mirah to write Android apps. The syntax is very similar to Ruby, so it will be comfortable for you. It compiles to a straight Java class with no runtime dependencies, so you don't get the performance hit you run into with Ruboto.

http://www.mirah.org/

WTF? In the Mirah examples, I see a bunch of

  i = 0
  while i < 10
    ...code...
    i += 1
  end

There's no for loop? I couldn't confirm because I didn't find a manual.

Check out ruboto-core at http://ruboto.org/

At the Texas Linux Fest, there was a great talk that reviewed non-Java ways of programming on Android:

http://texaslinuxfest.org/sessions/decaffeinated-robot-devel...

http://www.deepbluelambda.org/events/live/decaffeinated-robo...

There are some comparisons of code size for the different languages and environments. That was probably the most informative talk I attended at the Linux Fest.

You are being downvoted because your comment adds nothing to the conversation.