I'm not sure how useful those metrics would be at any point, since some ideas are simple, and others complex. Plus how do you quantify time since you got the idea? Just for example.
Agreed, it's just very hard to see quality in some of the items that get posted. That's not to take away from the effort gone into building and marketing them, I know it's hard work. I've failed in the startup world before myself. Just one of those thoughts that runs through your mind sometimes.
No, I haven't applied to work at google, but I have been contacted by two google recruiters in the past, told both of them politely to go to hell, and they left me alone after the second time. :)
I don't think the US needs more economic problems right now. This is a huge deal breaker for many companies, and short term, it will result in relocation of systems to emerging markets, and other established countries, like Canada, the European Union, Brazil, Russia, China, etc. Silly, silly move.
To be fair, Objective-C doesn't use C as an intermediate language, it actually is a strict superset of C, and only the objc calls end up being "translated" to C for the runtime to execute.
As mentioned by ericbb, there is Go, yes. I've been working on another; a prototype based OO language without inheritance, explicit delegation and type polymorphism, but have nothing I want to show just yet.
Inheritance is two language features in one though—It's implicit delegation and type polymorphism. Those two features need not be coupled together like that, and in fact, shouldn't in my opinion. It's not that silly things can be done with inheritance, it's more that people often use inheritance for one of two things, but rarely both: implicit delegation and type polymorphism. Pick your poison, and use the appropriate construct. I'm no fan of implicit delegation when I can get away with not having to deal with it, but I wish more languages would have an orthogonal construct for type polymorphism separate from inheritance.