Well they could have just gone with python if they had known this was coming. They probably picked Java on the basis that it is free to use and fits into the open-source community.
Android, Inc. (the original company) chose Java because their target market (smartphones) nearly universally supported Java (JVM) at the time of the inception of Android, so the phones ran Java and phone developers knew and were comfortable with Java.
This raised more than one eyebrowse, and sure did make me raise mine: how did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own?
Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s.
Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals... and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares.
