> I believe Gnome strongly encourages apps to be written in Vala (C#-alike with C support) now. [1]
No, some Gnome developers blame Vala for all their problems and want to rewrite everything in Rust :
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Val...
Vala isn't in a good state today, it virtually has no maintainer. Gtk isn't in a good shape either. API keep changing, bugs are never fixed and maintainers seem to care very little about stability. Actually the whole GObject ecosystem is in a difficult situation.
IMHO, using Python is right now the only viable way to write Linux desktop apps without using C or C++ .
> The built-in official Gnome programming IDE ("Builder") seems to support "C, C++, Python, Vala, Rust and Ctags" too. [2]
Gnome Builder isn't financed by the Gnome Foundation AFAIK.