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Comment by jiehong

3 days ago

I think it kinda was one of Perl’s goals at the time. But the syntax is rather unusual.

I keep wanting to get into Raku. It has such a rich pedigree of everything learned from decades of Perl, in a clean slate. It seems to suffer from lack of adoption but it seems better than *sh in every way except for ubiquity.

  • Indeed Raku is a delight to use for 'shell scripting'.

    Perl was originally written as an amalgamation of grep,sed,tr, awk and I am sure a few more unix utilities with their own mini languages. The idea was to use one language instead of tying together half a dozen mini-languages in a shell script. And it worked really well. Perl being a demon with text munging didn't hurt.

    Raku keeps this heritage but adds so much more (for better or worse :-) ). It inherits ideas from Lisp and functional programming languages. The thing that impressed me was, how easy it was to use concurrency.

  • It is much more complicated than Perl. Every feature you could ever want, in multiple ways, it seems like. Perl isn’t too complicated or large of a language.

  • I try Perl 6/Raku every few years, so it seems like I've tried it half a dozen times by now since it started. I like some things about it, but in a way it seems like an academic project, more suited for experimentation than doing work. I always come back to Perl, which has been my favorite hammer for 30 years.

As someone old enough to have been a Perl user during its glory days, I wonder what is unusual about it, it feels right at home in UNIX.