Thanks I was staring at the code examples trying to figure out which language it was. Some of the examples looked like C# but then some I could have swore were C++. Took me a minute.
Which is when I realise is has to be Dutch.
But should I learn Dutch? Even though it's a fine language? Maybe I'm better off learning English and German first. And French. Dutch, and Vala, are too niche.
I wish ElementaryOS, would, in probably this order, would have:
a) used ObjectiveC instead of Vala. Elementary is attractive to to Mac users or admirers. Why not leverage what they know?
b) Exposed their API through some language agnostic mechanism. Heck, spits .NET even?
c) Supported interpreted languages such as Ruby, Python, Perl even.
IIRC I brought this up on some mailing list or other a LONG time ago, but (of course) was met - "Get with the program. Vala is fine."
It is fine, but come on. Everything about Linux (desktop) is niche to begin with. Why jump into a super-niche of a niche?
Linux really just needs a better GUI toolkit than GTK and Qt, but these things are tremendously complex to build and as shitty as the web is, it’s quite a lot less shitty than these toolkits. This is why I think the ChromeOS model is the right way to go—every app’s UI is a browser app with a local daemon running on the backend, maybe in a container (but do away with ChromeOS’s custom modified kernel and prohibition against native code execution). In the worst case we’re writing JavaScript/TypeScript/etc on a browser instead of Vala on GObject, but WASM may well mean that we can write in any language.
(I once offended some Dutch friends of mine by calling Dutch "German with a Geordie accent," although when you get down to it, "German with a Geordie accent" pretty much describes English, too.)
Or Swift?