It starts with a choir of ambient vocals singing "it's a sunshine", there's some bird noises and traffic sounds, a snippet of organ synth flourishes.
Then it all gets started - guitar, sitar, horns, strings a vocal duet singing "Shine your sweet loving down on me"
There's actually a ton going on, every few bars it changes things up, there's clever little harpsichord.
Then a male singer starts proclaiming "It's a sunshine daaaayyy", backed up by a chorus of "yeah, yeah, yeah"s. Honestly it's kind of catchy
The last 30 seconds or so are truly cursed, there's a voice in the right speaker moaning "wide eyed retina. mostly logical", which gets delayed, bitcrushed, and pingponged between the speakers.
Wow! I wonder why this specific track has so much going on compared to the others.
For example, I want to buy Quake on the Nintendo eShop. The website wants to know my age in order to show me a age restricted game. So it will always ask me the age same question even if I have already answered hundred of times. So does Steam and many other websites. Is this a by-product of some compliance or self-regulatory requirement like ESRB?
If not, it would make much more sense to just ask a yes/no question for the age criteria. Usually this argument is answered with "what about fraud?". Well, asking the birthday is no guarantee at all that the birthday is correct. It only adds friction.
As a small revenge I always use an absurdly old birth date on these forms. This way if they are collecting this data, my input will be discarded or pollute their datasets.
So far I've only read the first few chapters of the book, and the exercises often feel too difficult to me. But I think he does a great job of easing into mathematical notation, pausing to reflect on what a seasoned mathematician might be thinking when they come across that notation. He also makes a lot of analogies to programming, and has example programs that are easy to follow. It's helpful to have that angle to understand things from.
I think my favorite keyboard shortcut in IntelliJ is double-tapping shift to get a really smart search to pop up.
Also general comments about things like quality, extendibility, community, momentum, learning curve, level of fun, reliability etc. would be really helpful - thanks!
SuperCollider is much more general - you have a server that can build and execute graphs of unit generators, and a language that has a ton of convenience features for interacting with the server, and abstractions for scheduling events. (sidenote, I'm starting to build an audio patching environment using SuperCollider. It doesn't do anything yet but I'm hoping to have something soon https://github.com/YottaSecond/Triggerfish)
SuperCollider also has a great community - questions on the mailing list are usually answered within a couple of hours, and there's a team of people furiously working on the upcoming 3.7 release.
I love Pure Data to death, it has an amazing community and is actively being developed, but I have some trouble recommending it because of the aging Tcl/Tk interface.
ChucK looks really interesting. In most environments you need to write unit generators in C/C++ to actually do low-level audio processing. ChucK uses a "strongly-timed" programming model, where you can actually use the same language to process sound sample-by-sample and schedule things at real musical intervals.
Extempore is also worth looking into if you aren't afraid of lisp.
So yeah, it depends largely on what you want to do. The live-coding languages like SonicPi are probably the best for getting music going quickly, but the others all have unique things to offer.