I think of Vala as the “Swift of Gnome”. As in, a nice language primarily useful for programming in the World Of Gnome, like Swift is a nice language for programming in the World of Apple. I don’t use Gnome, so I’m not interested in their Swift. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Vala hasn't really caught on outside of the GTK world, since it's based on the glib object system.

Similar to a language like D. Technically quite good, but not quite compelling enough that it has picked up momentum that is likely to push it into the mainstream and generate a large library ecosystem.

Do you mean Vale? Vala (the gnome langage) is in an unrelated category.

Vala seemed interesting to me quite a while ago, but V ticks the right boxes.