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.
Arcadia dev here! We're always actively working on Arcadia, and are closing in on our next release that brings with it a package manager and all kinds of other goodness. Keep an eye on the repo or jump in the gitter for updates.
Lisp in VR is super exciting! We're following Carmack's work closely.
That would be amazing! Can you invoke command line scripts from LT? If so you could just use our included REPL client implemented in Ruby. Otherwise you'd have to port it to ClojureScript, but the client is designed to be simple enough to make that easy to do.
IL2CPP has been on our radar for a while. We haven't gotten any real access to Unity 5 yet, so we can't say what the compatibility will be like for sure.
But since IL2CPP acts on the CLR bytecode, and Arcadia emits valid CLR bytecode, in theory there shouldn't be a problem. Time will tell!
Totally! Arcadia is based on the Clojure-CLR port (an official project) maintained by David Miller for five years or so. It supports Mono.
We had to fork the compiler to introduce a small number of changes to make Arcadia work in Unity, though. Unity ships a very old version of Mono with their own changes, so stock Clojure-CLR would not work.
I've been using the Motofone for three years now and I love it. The texting doesn't bother me either. It's also the lowest common denominator of phones that call and text, so we test all our dumb apps against it.
Brilliant! I love how using the ten hundred words makes the text more readable and less readable at the same time. The paragraph on the AST is my favorite.