The GNOME APIs are language agnostic. They're a fantastic example of language agnotism. Anything written with the Glib library or libraries that have Glib bindings for them, can be accessed from any language that is GObjectIntrospection-able: currently this is Javascript and Python, but there might be more.

>> lowering the barrier to entry so low that you're going to have an absolute tonne of horrendously written, likely insecure apps, is all that good.

I disagree. One of the most common questions about opensource projects is "where do I start contributing?", and the FOSS community admits that the initial contribution barrier is high.

Horrendously written apps I can live with: I just won't use them. Regarding insecurity, I'd much rather an insecure desktop app than an insecure web app (that might be accessible to the world).

RE: bindings other than javascript/python [0]. I have used the Go binding.

[0] https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection/Users

The APIs are written in C, and have bindings to most languages.

Recommending is all they are doing here (the title is quite inaccurate)

Describing the title as "quite inaccurate" is very generous. "deliberately inflammatory in order to generate page views" is much closer to the mark given that the article came from the register.