What is the crowd's opinion of Vala?

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It's really not that hard, esp. if you know C# and to some extent java I guess. These lists are great to see all the features quick :

https://live.gnome.org/Vala/ValaForCSharpProgrammers

https://live.gnome.org/Vala/ValaForJavaProgrammers

requires and ensures make my dick ROCK HARD.

Type calculation/inference, lambda expressions, and generics are NOT just syntactic sugar.

Hmm, perhaps it it partially true what you say. I guess the GObject system provides the garbage collection for lambda expressions.. (Edit: of course, a compiler that does it that way might miss some optimizations, when garbage collection occurs can sometimes be determined at compile-time.)

Nice to see them get closer to lisp.

> Why do the people in charge of Gnome care what language a piece of software is written in, if it meets whatever other standards they set?

What standards do you have in mind that are not best served by a programming language?

I initially had the same knee-jerk response as you and as most in this thread. But later thought brought me around.

If you want to write a game or any other tool in Scheme or any other language and distribute it yourself, great. But calling it a Gnome game implies that it's going to work well in the Gnome desktop and be part of their build and QA process. GObject alone is complex enough that using it from C is unwieldy and error-prone. A Schemer's first response to that situation would be writing macros to more clearly and correctly represent what the code needs to do. That's not really very different from creating a pre-compiler using a syntax that's somewhat familiar to the community.

There also doesn't seem to be a great shortage of tools written in Vala.

On this reddit, you're saying your glad you use XFCE ... because C is a more suitable language? Really? :)