Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Here are the first few paragraphs:

Yesterday I read a blog post / announcement about how Gnome is moving to Javascript and I wanted to write some feedback.

It is great that they are using a garbage-collected language for as much code as possible. For a component-based shell UI, Javascript is a reasonable choice, and surely better than C, C++, or Java. I realize they started down this road towards Javascript years ago, but I think it is worth re-considering whether they are on the right path.

With big decisions, it is nice to have a paper trail. I can find no supporting documentation backing up the decision and the reasons other than one blog post written after the fact, which doesn’t give very much information.

It appears the decision was made in a meeting. It is great to have meetings to discuss things, and it is great to make decisions in meetings, but oftentimes the results are about moving the decision-making process forward, not actually committing to big things. Even if there were many in that room, there are surely facts they didn’t have, and other interested parties who were not there. There is the risk of “tyranny” by a self-selected cabal. Hopefully the decision wasn’t made at a bar ;-)