[technomancy]

IMO the comparison between these platforms is only interesting when you take alternate languages into account. We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind, so how do more advanced languages fare on these platforms?

[ephermata]

For WP7, the officially supported languages are C# and VB.NET. That being said, because it is just running Silverlight, you can try running any .NET language.

For example, there are a few people running F# on Windows Phone 7. I haven't tried it myself, but here is a link to templates for game development with F# on WP7: http://sharp-gamedev.blogspot.com/2010/12/project-templates-...

Here's an article on building a WP7 app with IronRuby: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff960707.aspx While this isn't as fast as it could be, because you can't access Reflection.Emit to JIT method bodies to native code, it does show you can run Ruby in a WP7 app.

[technomancy]

Exactly what I'm talking about; thanks for the links.

[tvon]

> We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind (...)

Behind what?

[Dn_Ab]

While I side with his statement, I neither like the condescending tone of his phrasing. But i believe he means advanced, 'esoteric', fancy smarty pants stuff like functional languages. One can spend aeons frivolously debating why pragmatism is (not) better than pure expressive power. And which language is what and then devolve to what is definable. mere mortals have better things to do with their finite lives.

Anyways... I can attest to F# being a breeze to get on WP7 and Scala can be wedged into android with some effort. Thats about it I think of in terms of no extra runtime required solutions.

[technomancy]

Behind the state of the art in language design. Compare C# to F#, or Java to Scala. And that's not even taking into account languages like Haskell, Io, and Clojure that introduce more radical new concepts. (Not that the concepts themselves are new, but they appear radical to Java and C# devs.)