> That's the paradigm shift.

You can make desktop apps in Python, Ruby, Tcl, hell even PHP for a long time now. No compilation needed.

Whether this works effectively or not comes rests almost entirely on how good their architecture is. "Hackable" doesn't mean anything if the codebase is a coupled mess. Given GH's pedigree, I don't expect that this is the case; which means there will be some ramp-up time learning the various subsystems.

Desktop apps aren't things that you can cram into this week's hipster JS framework.