The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Nope. As someone else has already noted it is old. It is also out of print. Even the web docs on www.gnome.org are bad. Describing a libraries under a banner noting it's deprecation. And look at the language bindings.

C? Duh.

C++ also looks well maintained.

Java? Tutorials "Coming Soon" for about five years now. "has been used to develop non-trivial applications" and "coverage level is reaching maturity" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to jump in and find out what works and what doesn't while developing code intended for production.

Perl? "Our documentation isn't what we'd like it to be..." is truthful. A look around leads me to think most of the GNOME APIs are supported at some level.

Python? A lot of GNOME apps are written in Python so one would think there would be documentation out there.... one would be mistaken. All pointers in the FAQ are to information dated between 2001 and 2003 so considering how many APIs have been deprecated since then...