Scheme on Android

Previously, I wrote about developing in Scheme on the iPhone. Now in a post on the Google Research Blog, Bill Magnuson, Hal Abelson, and Mark Friedman are writing about using Scheme to develop on Android. Their work is part of the App Inventor for Android project that envisions using the Android as part of introductory programming courses for majors and non-majors alike.

Students would use a visual programming language, similar to Scratch, that provides a drag and drop interface in which students assemble applications for the phone. The visual language is compiled to s-expressions for a DSL written in Scheme macros. They are using the Kawa framework as their Scheme engine.

There aren't a lot of details in the post, but we can hope that developers will eventually get access to the underlying Scheme. This project is tremendously cheering to those of us who have been mourning the passing of 6.001.