Alternative languages

In theory, any programming language capable of producing Java compatible byte-code can be used with the existing Robocode engine.

The trick would be for Robocode to support the language directly - like it does with the Java and the Jikes compiler. For me when I started this was a great benefit - no need to install a IDE or SDK - just run robocode and go.

For beginners a simpler language would be of benefit - what's would you recommend?

I'm kind of thinking that Lua might be a good language to target, because it's about as easy for beginners as it gets (and a JVM version of sorts does exist [1]).

One other note is, I think a lot of thought would need to be put into the robot API used for this proposed project. I'm of the opinion that the existing non-AdvancedRobot APIs do a less-than-ideal job at being simple to actually use even though the API is simple, and the AdvancedRobot API is kind of messy, in part due to how it's evolved over time (backwards compatibility and such).

The original API was born from the ACM competition and was designed on purpose to be hard-to-use.

Weird coordinate system, bots being disabled after 1000 API calls...