I didn't know what gnote was, and when I was reading that I thought he was trying to say that it was a Mono/C# app. My impression of what he was saying -- which it turns out is probably way off -- was that Mono/C# in the hands of seasoned developers takes just as long to write code as bare c/c++ (much in the way that unseasoned developers thought php was 'easy' but they were writing fast code because they were leaving out things like checking for SQL injection/etc that a seasoned developer would be looking to prevent).
Since GNote is a C++ port of a Mono/C# app I don't know what he's trying to say.