... although the impression I get from the stuff I've been reading is that there's a 3-4 second delay when starting up an app written in Clojure. There were hopes that Froyo will help in this regard, but I haven't been able to find any reports on that yet. My Nexus One should be arriving this week, so I guess I'll be finding out soon :)
I submit that if you take the time to learn Objective-C you'll feel quite differently.
I've learned many languages in my years, while neither Java nor Objective-C is my favorite language right now (erlang is, though I haven't used it for awhile) they both were at different points in my life.
I hated Objective-C for the first week or two, then came to understand it, and saw how it was so much better than Java.
Of course, Java means both the language syntax and the frameworks, and half of what makes Objective-C so great is the frameworks.
Don't let syntax hang you up... you have to get over the syntax hassle to really understand a language. If you want "bad" syntax, look at erlang. That was tough, I had to force myself to learn it, but once I did, the syntax became a non-issue.
Objective-C has every advantage Java does, but the converse is not the case.
I submit that if you take the time to learn Objective-C you'll feel quite differently.
I've used ObjC for many years and released several Cocoa apps. The syntax isn't the problem; I actually rather like the brackets.
Objective-C has every advantage Java does, but the converse is not the case.
No garbage collection (on iOS at least), inherently unsafe, primitive types requiring silly [NSNumber numberWithInt:x] contortions, header files, no namespaces...
Better than java is a pretty low bar but I am not sure that OC makes it even then. I learnt enough to know who much I hated it and then did most of my iphone coding in c++.
Thanks for the Python APK link, last time I checked you couldn't deploy standalone Python apps but now I can play with it.