Nothing C#-like? Hmmm…compare:

using GLib;
namespace Foo {
  class Bar : Object {
    public delegate void DoStuff( string s );
    public static void SayIt( string s ) {
      stdout.printf( "%s\n", s );
    }
    public static void Debug( DoStuff d, string s ) {
      d( "Debug: " + s );
    }
    public static void main( string[] args ) {
    	Bar.Debug( Bar.SayIt, "Baz" );
    }
  }
}

using System;
namespace Foo {
  class Bar : Object {
    public delegate void DoStuff( string s );
    public static void SayIt( string s ) {
      Console.WriteLine( s );
    }
    public static void Debug( DoStuff d, string s ) {
      d( "Debug: " + s );
    }
    public static void Main( string[] args ) {
    	Bar.Debug( Bar.SayIt, "Baz" );
    }
  }
}

Vala is about 95% identical in syntax with C# judging by the tutorial (http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Tutorial).

If you’ve never done GTK+ before, I’d recommend sticking with pygtk. Python is an excellent language to rapidly develop applications and has never let me down before. Many GTK+ tools are developed in pygtk nowadays, so it has become a very mature platform. There are superb bindings for everything you could need; DBus, Telepathy, GConf, …

That said, Python can be slow. That shouldn’t be a problem for most applications, but its difficult to beat C in terms of speed.

So if you experience any performance problems, you might want to drop to Vala for those special pieces. You can implement them in Vala and use them from Python very easily.

Vala might still need some polishing, but it’s working right now and it’s as close as you can get to C without actually ‘dropping’ down to C level.

I’d say; use python for the actual application development (tying strings together, interface logic) and use Vala for your libraries. If you want to.

This is not quite true. If you don’t need containers or streams, there is no need to link with libstc++ (if we are talking here about gcc). If you use new/delete operators, only you have to link with libsupc++, which is cca. 17x smaller than libc used by gcc C compiler.