hi everyone, author here. i am glad this project is still starting conversations six years after it came out! if youre interested in a longer read on the subject of the cultural assumptions of programming and computing systems i wrote an essay for Technology as Cultural Practice last year: http://ojs.decolonising.digital/index.php/decolonising_digit...
To your first point, Mooi is planning on using Clojure as a scripting language. Clojure compiles to CLR bytecode, and is in theory as fast as C# is as a language. Using the idiomatic persistent data structures has an overhead, of course, but Clojure allows you to be flexible with how and when you do that. I wouldn't say Lua or JavaScript are "reasonably faster" than Clojure is on the CLR.
To your second point, we're aware that there's room to optimize and we're actively working on it. We profile and optimize our code paths regularly, and the results are often surprising. If there's "obvious" stuff left in there it's because we're tackling bigger fish than e.g. a foreach loop. None of these are show stoppers, in practice, but this is part of why we're in pre-alpha.
Exactly! I'm one of the core devs, and we all see Arcadia as an experiment in what game development could be. Some people want to expend effort mastering the tools of the day, and that's totally cool, but we're somewhat more motivated to spend our time trying new things. Members of the community have already pushed out a number of games, and their experiences have guided made the tool better and better.
Fair, but there's an important difference between a tool where live coding is technically possible and a tool designed to support it. Clojure is built from the ground up for the REPL experience and supports e.g. redefining functions seamlessly. The fact that it's functional helps a lot, too, since that means that the order things are defined or executed in matters less.