I see what you mean and although the definition of a from-scratch transducer looks a bit ugly to me, the idea of composing existing transducers together seems rather elegant.
Though I likely haven't completely understood each of the authors gripes, each problem to me seems to have a notable solution provided by Clojure (with the exception of tail-call optimization).
Clojure:
is compiled to JVM byte-code and is fast.
has a good parallelism story (parallel map, parallel fold, channels)
is almost completely backwards compatible.
has a sequence abstraction that leverages the same operations over many different types (string, vecctor, list, set, map, etc.).
has a standard compose function.
has reduce, map and filter in the standard library. Transducers (also first class) further extend their usefulness.
's closures allow statements and there's even sugar for annonymous functions.
has macros to reduce boilerpate.
has a conditional macro.
I'm sure this list isn't unique to Clojure but I'm most familiar with it.
I recommend Peter Attia's (currently unfinished) series, "The straight dope on cholesterol". He's a surgeon interested in health and fitness. http://eatingacademy.com/?s=cholesterol
I've heard it said that Clojure's macro system is most similar to Common Lisp's macro system and that Racket (and Scheme) style macros are more powerful. Can anyone compare the differing approaches?
It seems to me that Apple has had a rich history of interesting languages: Squeak, Dylan, Hypertalk, AppleScript and Swift. Those are just the ones I know of.
I agree "they"/"them" sounds cleaner than "he or she"/"him or her" but isn't it officially incorrect? I do like that Facebook has started using "they"/"them".
Except for special occasions:
no vegetable oil,
no wheat,
less sugar.
I agree with much of the paleo, keto, weight lifting and meditation submissions on here. I would add that I think there isn't much better for you than saturated and monounsaturated fat and that there isn't much worse for you than "vegetable" (industrial seed) oils because of their high (especially omega-6) polyunsaturated fat content.
Two books I would really recommend are "Perfect Health Diet" by the Jaminets and "The Paleo Manifesto" by John Durant. "The Paleo Manifesto" is a 30,000ft view of health from an ancestral perspective. The "Perfect Health Diet" delves into the chemistry of metabolism and is very interesting in it's own right if you're into that kind of thing.