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).
well, putting aside things "dynamic access to the symbol table" or run-time ast manipulation types of black magic, first class functions and "automatic storage management" are available in both Python, Ruby (...yeah, you need to twist your mind towards thinking in blocks/procs as first class functions, which annoys the hell outta me, but doesn't seem to be a problem for others) and most other "dynamic" languages.
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.
I recently tried GNOME 3.4 for about a month. I liked it right away: it's pretty and it's practical. I stopped using it because it slowed down my (old, granted) computer horribly after a few days (memory leak?). Restarting the computer made it feel faster again, but I like keeping the machine on all the time (I usually only restart when there's a kernel update in my distro). I went back to LXDE and my machine feels so much faster: even freshly started, before a few days of slowdown, GNOME 3.4 is slower than LXDE, and I use mostly the same programs on both: chromium, evince, gvim, empathy, totem, etc.
For the record, "works for me" is the least useful way of addressing someone's concerns. Way back when I worked in QA, I absolutely hated the WORKSFORME status in Bugzilla.
Seriously, in reality, gnome3 and gnome shell are pretty nice.
[and I have exactly the feeling you do: it gets out of my way except when I want to use it, and then it's easily available]
The gnome shell especially is also a welcome sign that there's some independent thinking about UIs going on, which is a welcome change from the painful old "let's be just like windows with a few tweaks!" schtick of times past.
Its worst sin is that it represents change, and, well, people hate change... :[
