Gnome vs Kde in my mind

The result is GNOME for me.

1. Gnome uses C, which is much easier for programming newbie as me. But there are a lot of bindings like Gtkmm for C++. When you are confident for high quality Object-oriented programming, you can think about moving away to other platform or X windows. While KDE uses C++, to start learning programming with this platform, in my mind is not good idea.
2. Gnome if totally free with GPL. KDE's base is QT, which is free on Linux, but not for all the OS, such as MS Windows. So the troubles maybe are not far from you, especially when you want to do some commercial project programming with QT, at that time, maybe it's a little bit late to convert to Gnome. And also this problem make a lot of vendors keep away from it.
3. Maybe the reason in 2), Gnome has a lot of supports and sponsors like IBM, Redhat, Sun. They can do whatever they like without any worry about legal issues. So with their supports and sponsors Gnome is growing much better and faster. As users and developers working in such a platform will benefit all the time, almost no worries about out of date or using or learning something without future.
4. KDE is much like Windows, both the appearance and integration with embedded programs. I don't like windows environment in this way. Gnome is much better, almost nothing embedded compared to KDE, that's true that KDE brings a large mount of programs. But what Gnome provides is the stable and highly extensive base platform. I think this is why some many big companies like it, they can develop their own programs to attract users, for instance, Mozilla's Firefox, Sun's OpenOffice. Gnome is working as a free medias to put advertisements on it. This should be the proper way of how the media platform should work in, just like some many free newspapers in London.
   
5. For my own favorite, I like Ubuntu, but Kubuntu are not so friendly and bring me a lot of debugging issues, such as gnome-system-monitor, Knetworkmanager and Kwallet always work improperly. So, just to use the default desktop environment is always right.