I have been using straight for a while now and I think it is great! The ability to lazy load everything by default does a lot to make Emacs snappier (or at the very least, faster to boot). Being able to pull packages directly from git (be it local or a forge) makes package development a lot easier. raxod has a lot of really sleek, modern emacs packages that I would encourage everyone to check out, selectrum[0] and ctrf[1] in particular are really great as well.
You can get autocomplete for Java methods in Cider (Emacs) and probably Cursive (Intellij) afaik. Type checking in intro code can be a bit difficult, but REPL/live development really helps. You are going to catch mismatched type at first call, so you can usually get there by reading the Javadoc, but it does take some practice. Most Clojure code also works with Java through the smallest interface possible at the edge of your system, so it is very rare to have to deal with those issues in your "main" code.
As much as I admire Processing for making it easy to draw pixels on the screen, something that seems to get more difficult every year, I do find it very difficult to use as a teaching tool. Going from Hello World to something more intricate is a bumpy ride with very few affordances, the feed through from drawing a rect to interfacing with I/O is, while obviously a difficult problem, non-existent. "Creative coding" also requires both a high degree of mathematical and artistic capability in order to be something other than a soup of primary color on the screen, something beginning programmer (esp. "non-technical" ones) tend to struggle with.
That said, I still really admire what they did and how extremely influential it has been. Just a small thing like how the the Processing IDE was forked to create the Arduino IDE attests to how Processing continues to reverberate throughout history.
preview.app has been around since NextSTEP, which used display postscript for its windowing engine. Having a first-class pdf reader falls out pretty naturally.
It should also be noted that, at least in my experience, you don't use the transit readers/writers directly as in the example post, but have a library like https://github.com/metosin/muuntaja do that for you.
I cannot say enough good things about chwm (or yabai[0], as he now calls it), by far the best window management tool I've used on macOS. Unlike most other tools, it is instantaneous and requires no mental effort. In conjunction with skhd[1], it gives a super clean interface for you to completely control your desktop. It's only too bad that you have to disable SIP for all the APIs to get exposed.
I think Reason 2 really hits the nail on the head. Very few multiplayer get away with properly rewarding player skill. The new Quake seems to have the same problem. Most of the population consists of veterans, which makes it so that new players have a hard time getting opponents at their level, thus creating a nasty feedback loop. Getting into Artifact today would probably be a similar experience. I think it is a peculiar trend, as single player games seems to be going in the opposite direction with titles like Dark Souls, the plethoras of insanely difficult indie titles and speedrunning like practices growing more popular by the day.
The most efficient way to adress this "problem", while still keeping the qualities of a high skill ceiling, seems to be scale and strict matchmaking. With that in mind, it is sad that Artifact never got off. The evenly matched games that I had during the first week of release where some of the most exciting experiences I have had.
One of the things that make magic so great is precisely that one does not have to remember all the shortcuts. The author has written and released his own tool for popups and tooltips[0]. The keys are also among the more sane binds you find in Emacsland, so you can often browse by guestimation.
Definitely! Chapter two deals directly with Clojure idioms, but other than that the content is quite general. Zach has said in multiple interviews that one of his future projects could be something like an "Elements of Software". Fingers crossed!