Radhakrishnan, I would be considered a non-developer and more of a system admin/architect. I’ve used Perl 4/5 since the 1990s with success. My opinion of Python is not particularly high, except that it is ubiquitous (like Perl 5). Ruby was not unpleasant. I’ve sampled a few others, but none were particularly fantastic for my general scripting purposes.
I consider Raku<https://raku.org/> (formally renamed from “Perl 6” Oct 2019) as a modern alternative to Perl 5. All of my operating system scripts are now in implemented in Raku. I did frequently wince at some of the constructs that I had to put together in Perl. I saw myself writing line noise and write-only scripts/modules, but I really didn’t have alternatives in Perl. I have yet to experience any regret with coding Raku. Raku appears to me to be the most well-thought-out language I’ve ever experienced. I make basic & intermediate programming constructs, and the deeper I go, the more satisfying the coding experience. I am confident that I can make reusable code in Raku that will be maintainable in 20 years. The Raku coding experience to me is like that of a 12-year-old playing the latest video game on a 90” 16K screen. That’s just how it is. I don’t mean to cheerlead. I’m sincere. It promotes “flow”, which encourages me to learn and produce more. Perl had that “flow” characteristic too, and Raku inherited it. The first release was Christmas 2015, launching with a small ecosystem<https://modules.raku.org/>. Now it is growing with many useful modules (Web Services, DevOps, etc.). The community is active, very patient, civil, and spot-on-helpful. Raku is a big language. I’m really hoping one or more of the superstars of Raku will publish “Idiomatic Raku: Parallelism, Concurrency, & Asynchrony”, “Idiomatic Raku: This”, “Idiomatic Raku: That”, etc. A big language like this would benefit from more guidance. Random blogs regularly publish brilliant Raku ideas, but it is a challenge to catalog/archive them. I do hope for more expert knowledge sharing. I think Larry Wall’s ambition was to make a “100 year” language. Personally I can see that in Raku (until Quantum perhaps). Raku has legs. It probably isn’t positioned for the popularity contests of today, but I think that it has much more promise than people are aware of. Try building a website or a web service in Cro<https://cro.services/> to see the utility of Raku first hand. Mark From: Radhakrishnan Venkataraman <weor...@gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2020 11:04 To: l...@dijkmat.nl Cc: perl6-users@perl.org Subject: just curious to know Hi, I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past. Ever since perl 6.0 was announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely. At last perl 6.0 has just started from its starting block and is also in the race. I am happy about that. Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc., I want to know what perl 6 is so special in. When perl 5.0 was there, there did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as perl 5.0 did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special? I am unable to know it from google search, as much information is not available. Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 6, then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) are already spreading its wings over the information technology field. Both are statically typed and compiled languages and there would be more "welcome gesture" for these languages in the field. To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's technology? Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this. Thank you, Regards, Radhakrishnan
