not entirely true. Gnome has a first class language - Vala [1] - that is for writing performant system level applications. And the community is quite active as

not entirely true. Gnome has a first class language - Vala [1] - that is for writing performant system level applications. And the community is quite active as well - https://github.com/trending?l=vala https://github.com/trending?l=vala If you think of automation, there have been attempts at bringing flow based programming to the Gnome-JS engine (think of it as Quartz Composer integrated into the desktop) [3] - plus the fact that http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org is about as automatic as you can get to customize the desktop. Is it a difference in positioning ? Because honestly I'm a little befuddled on why all the developers on HN get supremely excited about JS on OSX... and not something like NoFlo.js integrated into Gnome. [1] https://github.com/GNOME/vala https://github.com/GNOME/vala [2] http://lethalman.hostei.com/maja/index.html http://lethalman.hostei.com/maja/index.html [3] http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/noflo-and-gnome/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/noflo-and-gnome/