Comment by klibertp

1 year ago

> there is a very [tiny, very] loyal core of smart people

FTFY ;) Honestly, I love Raku - it's almost like Racket of the non-sexp world - but the community is microscopic, and the development is slow. It's a shame because, solely based on features and in terms of design, it's a serious contender for the most powerful dynamic language out there. It's packed with interesting features (junctions, phasors, traits, quote/unquote macros (soon), typed variables and subsets, coercible types, augment, OO system with multiple inheritance, interfaces, generics, multi-subs and multi-methods everywhere, custom operators including circumfix, regexes and grammars, etc, etc...) out of the box and it's actually really impressive how all these features work together in a cohesive design.

Unfortunately, the underlying implementation seems a bit chaotic; some features are either not fully implemented or specified, the performance could be better, and so on. So, while I love and still use Raku for almost all my scripting, if I were to start a serious project, I think I'd go with Common Lisp instead. CL has fewer features out of the box, but many of the missing ones are one `ql:quickload` away (or you can use CIEL), while the underlying implementation (SBCL in my case) is diamond-solid.

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Aside: that `render` method could be sweetened a lot! For example:

        tbody @!data.map: { tr .map(&td) } ==> table :border<1>

or:

        tbody @!data.map(*.map(&td).&tr) ==> table :border<1>

or finally (using the fact that hyper descends into subarrays):

        tbody @!data».&td.map(&tr) ==> table :border<1>

(I think Raku is unrivaled in one-liners!)

2 comments

klibertp

librasteve 1 year ago

thanks for the code examples - personally I prefer mine (but that's my opinion)

one liners have their place - but I like to avoid compression for the sake of it

to put some numbers on it there are 146 folks listed on the main IRC chat (plus a bunch more (79) via the Discord channels) right now and 1.5k members of the sub-reddit

klibertp 1 year ago
> personally I prefer mine
Sure! I just thought if we're talking about "Syntactic Syrup of Ipecac" :D we can as well take it to the extreme, just to show how sugary Raku can really be (if you want).
As for the community size, I'm on Discord for a bunch of languages:
- Haxe: ~800 (users on the server) - Pharo: ~300 - Rust: ~10k - Scala: ~900 (might not be the gathering place of the community, would need to check) - Nim: ~700 - GToolkit: ~160
Taking your numbers, the community is about as big as GToolkit, which is a niche distribution of a niche language (Pharo Smalltalk). I think that's enough to keep the lights on and even to occasionally produce something really impressive. At the same time, it's not enough to consistently polish all aspects of the language and the ecosystem: with a community of that size, you will always be running into "not implemented yet"/"no bugfix for years" problems. Which is fine in some settings, but you need to keep this in mind.