A look at two new languages: Vala and Clojure

Yes - hopefully what was meant by the original comment was that one can have a source distribution which contains both the Vala sources and the generated C files, such that someone who just wants to "./configure && make install" can do so with only a C development environment installed.

Someone who wants to exercise "freedom 1" can do so, but will need to get a Vala development environment (much as someone who wants to do non-trival hacking on a project that includes a YACC parser will need Bison installed, but if they just want to build the program unmodified then they only need a C compiler).