Comment by em-bee
7 months ago
huh? that would suggest that perl has changed so much since the 90s that those views would no longer be valid.
CGIs in the 90s were written in perl 5, and perl hasn't evolved much since then. but perl was never a bad language. it had/has a quirky syntax. if you were coming from a lot of commandline work using sed, awk, tr, and many other tools to manipulate text in shell scripts, then perl made a lot of sense.
and while raku may have been a great improvement, perls reputation was tied to its syntax. the readability and writeability of the code. and that's the one thing that raku did not change significantly.
so unlike other examples i don't see how peoples views of perl could improve
I love Perl. Is Raku worth trying considering I love Perl for its performance, syntax, brevity, and so forth?
Raku feels like a different language to me, and it seems not-so-serious, maybe because of the name and their mascot (which is unfair to the language).
i haven't looked at it in detail, but if you like perl and you are looking for an interesting new language that has the spirit of perl, i'd say it is worth a try
> and perl hasn't evolved much since then
Perl (5) has been evolving, quietly. The language has had many nice additions over the years. Some of it is backporting from 6.
oh that's interesting. especially the backports. i did not consider that as realistic since perl6/raku is using an entirely new virtual machine. so maybe they are actually reimplementing ideas that are in raku but work with perl 5?
I can't speak to the degree to which Raku VM ideas are being backported. I'm not that deep into Perl. I just know that the Perl 5 language itself is still regularly enhanced, and some amount (can't give you a percentage or speak to the pedigree of all the changes,) of that is inspired by Perl 6. Perl 5 now is a great deal nicer than it was, say 10 years ago, due to these updates.
Sub signatures, defer blocks, official "class", "say", try/catch, enhanced dereference syntax, new and enhanced operators, etc. Significant language changes have been and continue appearing.