In early 2000 I made some small, commercial, games using BlitzBasic and Blitzmax. Coming from 7+ years programming in C/C++ it was a breeze to work with.
Mark Sibly, the creator BlitzBasic, Blitzmax and Monkey, really has a talent to make beautiful simple languages.
What I took from those years is that the best tools are those that let you hit the ground running.
Anyway, I want to thank you for the Imatix webserver (blast of the past), Libero and the first few chapters of Scalable-C and all the other snippets of knowledge and wisdom which I'm happy to carry around on my head. Good stuff.
It's a very fun language to begin with. Which is not unimportant if you want to keep being motivated after three decades being a programmer. Peter Norvig described 7 features which made Lisp different. Perl shares 6 of them. Important features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management. (source "High Order Perl" by MJ Dominus).
I'm wondering what people do exactly hate so much in Gnome? I'm working right now in Gnome 3.6. It's not perfect, but it suits me pretty well by being simple elegant and not in my face.