Spacemacs

Looking for C/C++ emacs integration, found another emacs tutorial which led me to Spacemacs (vim+emacs, but the clean one). Looks promising mostly because the community seems to be very active.
UPDATE: gave up on the topic, as this flavor of Emacs needs a set of skills I don't have. I mean the vim background.

Considering different languages.

Possible candidates are:

• Vala
• Nim

At first glance Nim looks very good, I am considering using it for the implementation. The reason is the set of articles I've read plus the fact that I have a background fitting to this language (Pascal, Delphi, Lisp, C, C++).

Heck, I liked Swift a bit, mostly for its syntactic sugar (like chaining of the optionals and type inference). Then I liked Vala for its simplicity and integration with GTK. Now I like Nim...

Looks definitely like the analysis paralysis.

Is GIMP worth spending time on it?

Now after reading a lot about the GIMP, I see that it has some critical problems.

Here are the links I have read (ones I have recorded):

• https://www.mail-archive.com/gegl-developer@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/msg00612.html
• http://www.rileybrandt.com/2014/03/09/photoshop-to-gimp/
• https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2015-February/msg00055.html
• http://www.thebloomapp.com/features/
• https://pixls.us/articles/freaky-details-calvin-hollywood/
• https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/
• http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-user/15297-how-to-design-new-gimp-themes-from-scratch
• http://www.maketecheasier.com/flat-gimp-icon-theme/
• http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?313266-New-Gimp-PS-CS6-Theme-with-icons
• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.84.7715&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• http://gimp-tutorials.net/

Currently I see the following problems with GIMP development (if I am going to dive into it):

1. The software architecture. It is neither documented, nor obvious from reading the Object-oriented C code.
2. The architecture seems to be too monolithic to allow deep changes like the ones I am interested to introduce.
3. Lack of organization: what I see in bugtracker and wiki is very far from optimistic picture.
4. Strange choice of tools - as for 2015 - like plain C with "manual" OOP. I see no reason why they don't use at least Vala. I have a feeling that the language, despite being absolutely fine for OS kernel, is slowing the development down.

Here is what I see the most critical current problems of GIMP:

• Lack of non-destructive editing. Most flagrant is lack of affine transformation and color control.
• Awful UX design. I know that some people can disagree with me, but here is my opinion: there is an industry standard. Instead of fighting with it, GIMP interface could live with it. Why some professional artist who uses Photoshop on a daily basis should learn new habits? What for?
  I have read somewhere beautiful explanation: the tool (GIMP in this case) is an obstacle that stays between artist and his/her goal. The tool should prevent artist to do the job as little as possible. Therefore responsiveness and predictability matters. Therefore it is important to follow the industry UX standards. It is important, because people already have some habits (including me btw.) and these habits are a scarce: they are in fact an experience. And to be fair, for me my habits are more valuable than the tool.

All in all I have a feeling that the development of the GIMP is artificially slowed down.
Some ideas under the hood are brilliant (like GEGL abstraction), but some are horrible (like OOP implemented using plain C).

Thus I am seriously considering diving into Krita despite I don't like the KDE.