Wow, that's an extremely poor choice of name for a programming language.

I was 100% sure this was the gnome thing.

In portuguese 'vala' is the hole you dig on the ground or a naturally occuring one. Which can also be used as a synonym to "cova" which translates to "grave". I bet it will be hard to make a community for it here in Brazil or Portugal.

People overestimate the impact of brand names having weird meanings in foreign languages.

For example, OSRAM unambiguously means "I will shit" in Polish, and despite that, it's one of the most popular lightbulb brands in Poland.

too late