When compared to JavaScript, Vala is fairly new and is the only language being used in GNOME development since its conception. It has quite an interesting concept: the programmers are exposed to C# and Java-like syntax, but underneath, the code will be translated into pure C and then compiled to binary.
This approach will make GNOME programming more accessible, because developing a GNOME application with C is quite hard to understand for beginners. It involves many boilerplate code snippets that you must copy and paste into your source code tree and then modify according to the guidelines. This step is totally hidden by Vala.
Similar to our adventure with JavaScript, we will now learn the basics of the Vala language without implementing any graphical elements. As Vala is a full-blown object-oriented programming language, we will immediately use the OOP concept in our journey with Vala.
Let's now prepare a project that will be used as our experiment. Remember the steps from Chapter 2, Preparing Our Weapons? Good! Let's do it again with some changes. We will use hello-vala as the project name.
In the preceding screenshot, we can see in Project options that we choose No license to minimize modifications that we are going to do next. We also uncheck the Use GtkBuilder for user interface option because we want to do a simple text-based application to grasp the essentials of Vala.