
Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku - Ovid
https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/pull/89
======
edflsafoiewq
From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler,
which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese).
Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means
"camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or
"music").

Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

~~~
zumu
So as a Japanese speaker, I don't think I ever would have made the 'raku' ==
'rakuda' camel connection.

Also, while 'raku' is the reading for 楽, which connotes easy, simple and other
good things, it is also the reading for a bunch of other characters--namely,
落, which means or carries the connotation of falling, declining or otherwise
missing the mark.

When I see the 'raku' transliteration in the context of Perl, I think of 落.
Not sure if that says something about my subconscious perception of Perl or
not, but I can't help but think 'Raku' is a bad choice for the name of a
language mired in indecision and falling from public favor.

On another note, I find the inclination of tech projects towards poorly
translated Japanese words amusing. It nicely compliments the phenomena you see
in the use of random English words for the naming of Japanese cars, condo
buildings, and other 'prestigious' products. So if you find that ridiculous,
you should find these 'Japanese' technology names ridiculous as well.

~~~
Ultimatt
Raku isnt falling from public favor, it hasn't made it yet. It's an entirely
different language to Perl 5. Like the difference between C and C# or Java.

~~~
zumu
Yea, sorry I'm not super familiar with the project, but that is the general
vibe I get about Perl.

Interestingly enough 落(raku) also has the connotation of failure or missing
the target, so not very auspicious in the context of a new language either!

~~~
gpvos
_> that is the general vibe I get about Perl._

Perl <=5 _did_ make it, it was quite big in the 90s and early 2000s.

------
kbd
Naming matters. Nim changing from "Nimrod" matters. Cockroachdb's name is
offputting. Perl 6's name has caused endless confusion and by itself sabotaged
both Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 has interesting ideas but I don't even want to
touch it because its naming issue is so toxic. I'm glad they're going to
rename it.

~~~
anonytrary
Is there a TLDR on what's wrong with the name "Perl 6" for those of us who
have zero context?

~~~
takeda
I believe the issue was that Perl 6 had too many changes that made it hard to
convert apps from earlier version.

That created some kind of limbo where people weren't sure if they should use
perl 5 or perl 6 (”why develop in perl 5, when it is probably a dead end and
perl 6 is the future” and at the same time "why should I convert to perl 6,
what if it will be a failure and I wasted my time?")

By renaming it, it revives Perl 5 so developent can continue, and at the same
time Perl 6 is presented as a new language, now whichever wins will be based
on its merit.

~~~
Grinnz
Also, importantly, reflecting that they are in no more competition than Perl
and Ruby are.

------
mikece
Kudos for making this change! This is what the folks at Microsoft should have
done when ASP became ASP.NET and ASP.NET became ASP.NET Core. I know...
keeping the root of the name the same makes management think the technology is
fundamentally the same (and, therefore, cheaper) but the SEO confusion trying
to find the right version of an answer is a PITA.

Secondarily, while Perl has never appealed to me I am more likely to admit I'm
checking out Raku because the chances that someone will ask me to look at and
debug their cousin's friend's manager's Perl 3 CGI app is considerably
reduced.

~~~
seirl
> Kudos for making this change!

Rakudos, even!

------
Upvoter33
I'm amazed that Perl is still around. I personally find it the least readable
language that I've ever used, and that includes a lot of languages. But some
people really seem to love it, for reasons a bit beyond me.

~~~
pmoriarty
How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it?

Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really
didn't know it very well, if at all.

Some of them might have glanced at some Perl code and saw a dense regex and
dismissed it as "line noise". Well, yeah, if you don't know regexes you would
be forgiven for thinking it was line noise, but if you did know regexes it
should look no more like line noise than a similarly dense regex in any other
language.

For a long time now, Perl has allowed regexes to be commented. Commenting
dense regexes and splitting them up in to short regexes assigned to
judiciously named variables is just good style in any language, and has been
the norm in Perl for a long time. Furthermore, modern Perl style guidelines
advise code to be written with verbose, English words instead of ancient Perl
one-character special variable names.

So setting aside both dense, uncommented regexes and ancient single-letter
special variable names, both of which have been recognized as poor style in
Perl for decades now, I'm really not sure what the complaints about Perl
readability are about. To me it looks really no uglier than any other
mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other
mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways.

If you include non-mainstream languages, some languages which have a lot of
fans here on HN are arguably a lot less readable than Perl to someone only
familiar with traditional Algol-style languages. In particular, I'm thinking
of Forth and Haskell. Yet you rarely hear complaints on here about their
readability.

~~~
j9461701
>How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it?

It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every
work day for the past 6 months.

>To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one
could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to
name is uglier in some of its own ways.

It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things that compound on top of each
other. Until you get something like this:

while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

Mostly though it's how it's used. It can technically do anything, so a lot of
the times it is asked to do everything. Until one day you wake up to find you
have hundreds of perl files, all tens of thousands of lines long, that all
interconnect in an insane Object Oriented hierarchy soup stretching across
every conceivable programming space - from database control to money
processing to security to web site design.

~~~
kbenson
> while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

That's a business culture thing. If you set the expectation, that it's okay to
do that, people might do that. If you set the expectation that it's not okay,
people shouldn't.

The equivalent C and Python are likely just as ugly (given that the equivalent
python might be using a far too complex range statement or put it on a single
line using : and ;, which is possible...).

That said, as bad code goes, that's not really that bad. The only non-standard
things are <> and $_, and if you don't know what those are, you really haven't
done the minimum of learning about the language (<> might be somewhat exotic
in that form depending on the codebase, but $_ is not something you can get
way with not knowing about). In all, the major problem with it is that it's
not commented and uses poor variable names, which is something every language
needs to deal with. I would write it like so if I wanted it on a single line
(but I would probably use 2-3 lines):

    
    
        # Report each duplicated line once
        my (%lineseen,@linedups); # This was required in yours too right? I assume you're using strict...
        while (<>) { (++$lineseen{$_}==2) && push(@linedups, $_); };
    

But I would likely opt for the following if doing it myself:

    
    
        # Report duplicate lines once
        my %lineseen;
        my @linedups = grep { ++$lineseen{$_}==2 } (<>);
    

Assuming I was using <>, which I generally don't since File::Slurp is usually
available and clearer.

~~~
cutler
There's always <STDIN> if <> is too cryptic. I think what most fail to grok,
if they've only glanced at Perl, is context. Above all Perl is a context-based
language. It's the opposite of Python's spell-everything-out approach but just
as valid. Perl also excels at whipupitude.

~~~
kbenson
Except that <> isn't just <STDIN>, it reads from each line of each file
specified as an argument on the command line _or_ STDIN if no files were
specified. This dual use (and magical-ness) is why I shy away from it in
actual programs (but it is useful for one liners, which is why it does this),
as it can be confusing.

Some people will look at this as evidence that Perl should be relegated to
one-liners, but I find _immense_ usefulness in combining my more engineered
aspects with one-liners, and providing myself with a "project evaluator". What
I do is create a simple bash script which just calls perl and sets the library
include path to the project lib, includes a few useful things to always have
(Path::Tiny, Try::Tiny, Data::Dumper, etc), and passed the rest of the args to
Perl. Using DBIx::Class for SQL manipulation and/or using complex API client
libraries I've written _combined with_ the abilities of perl to do things
easily as a one-liner is _amazing_.

------
natch
This is great news both for Perl and for Raku. I will probably bother to take
a serious look at Raku now, sometime, if anything just for curiosity. Why not
before? I have no good answer for that.

But my main worry about it is that I suspect it has brought along with it the
community's dysfunctional fascination with over-the-top cleverness and arcane
constructs. I'll probably stick with Python and Perl 5 on an as-needed basis,
but Raku will be fun to look in on for brain stimulation.

My best case hope is maybe it's clarified some things! Like having an agreed
on best practice for how objects are implemented, that would be nice.

~~~
petre
Why not before? Because Perl is you know, dead. Jokes aside, it's a pretty
nice language apart from the !$double .@sigils. If I'd switch from Perl 5, I'd
probably switch to Ruby, as Perl 6 oops Raku is quite slow.

~~~
SwellJoe
Ruby is also quite slow. The last benchmarks I saw makes it pretty clear Raku
has closed the gap with Ruby (at least the mainline C implementation of Ruby)
on a lot of fronts, and is likely to be faster for many things in another year
or two and the VM gets better at optimization. My google fu isn't up to
finding those benchmark results now, but it's no secret that Ruby is pretty
sluggish compared to Perl 5.

~~~
petre
I sure hope it will be faster because in my own tests it's slower than Tcl.
And I've tested at least two releases a year since october 2016 when the
stable Rakudo came out.

Ruby 2.5 has a _jit_ which uses the C compiler to generate dynamically linked
objects. It looks more like a workaround but it produces fast code. Then
there's Jruby, Rubinius, Truffle, mruby. Crystal too, which is a different
language but yet similar. No need to learn Go. Just take your Ruby background
and pretty much start using it for writing Crystal.

~~~
jashmatthews
The CRuby 2.6 JIT using gcc or clang improves some benchmarks but makes real
applications slower, sadly.

Thankfully JRuby already has a functioning JIT and TruffleRuby is getting very
close to a 1.0 release.

------
rollschild
I really wish the Perl 6 -> Raku change could let it catch up with other
languages such as Python.

Edit: sorry for the confusion. I meant popularity-wise. I wish the change
would clarify to people that Perl 6 and Perl 5 are basically two different
languages and people should at least consider Perl 6 as an option when they
start a new project.

~~~
resonantjacket5
Assuming you mean rename the next version of a programming language — I think
that’s a horrible idea. The entire point of continuing with the previous name
is that eventually the community will move onto the new language. I’m guessing
Perl 6 made too many incompatible changes from Perl 5 though I don’t know much
about them.

~~~
daotoad
Perl 6 started out as a plan for the next version of Perl.

Over the _years_ (announced in 2000, delivered in 2015) it evolved into a
distinct language.

In the meantime, Perl5 suffered from the Osbourne Effect.

Meanwhile a rift developed in the Perl community. Some are for Perl 5 forever.
Some are Perl 6 forever. Some Perl 5 people blame Perl 6 for Perl 5's
perception as a dead language. Some Perl 6 people blame Perl 5's reputation
for being "write only" and "dead" for difficulty getting people to try Perl 6.

IMHO, both sides are correct, both sides over-state their case.

Renaming Perl 6 has been discussed for close to a decade, by people who are
Perl 5, Perl 6, and just plain Perl partisans.

It's been a difficult decision. Many people have worked very hard on both
projects, and have strong feelings tied up in the issue. Important
contributors to the projects have quit as a result the issues.

This isn't a change that was lightly made. It's far bigger than the Python 2
to Python 3 divergence. It's more like moving from C to C#.

------
Ovid
This has been a huge deal for the Perl community.

First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5.

But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl
5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5
rather than the successor.

Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that
stalled many projects. So an "alias" for Perl 6 was created, but that didn't
seem to help.

Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and
Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to
simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way.

If I had my choice, I'd program in raku because it's a lovely language
addressing many pain points (including being one of the few dynamic languages
with a working concurrency model). But it's not adopted widely enough yet for
that to happen. Time will tell ...

~~~
jolmg
> Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku"
> and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able
> to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way.

I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change
again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.

~~~
joshlemer
It's not uncommon to leap frog versions in such cases. PHP went from 5 to 7,
for instance.

~~~
diag
But that's because PHP6 was dumped after being in development for a while.

~~~
SwellJoe
This is not entirely unlike that. Somewhere along the way, everybody realized
Perl 6 was not the path forward from Perl 5, and so Perl 6 never really took
the place of Perl 5, just like PHP6 never took the place of PHP 5. It looks
like a pretty similar scenario, if you squint, I think.

It makes little difference for Perl that this experiment in a next generation
version of the language is still alive and going its own way. The result is
the same...people kept moving forward with version 5, and if it needs a new
version, it can't use version 6 because 6 was already used for that other
experiment (that failed to take the place of Perl 5).

------
scythe
I kinda wish something like this would happen with LuaJIT, so it can get out
of Lua’s shadow.

Lua has breaking changes all the time, which makes sense for its original
purpose — embedding — where you don’t need to follow updates. As such the
version supported varies among different environments. But LuaJIT has an
ecosystem that they try not to break. It’s more of a “conventional” scripting
language because of that. It also has an FFI that isn’t in plain Lua.

------
andreygrehov
If anyone is interested in working with the language, AFAIK, DuckDuckGo's
backend is primarily written in Perl.

~~~
ricardobeat
Perl 6 / Raku introduces so many new constructs that is almost an entirely new
language.

------
bbanyc
I find Perl 5 best for the kinds of fire-and-forget text processing scripts
that are a bit too complicated for awk but not involved enough to bring in a
"real" language. It's a double-edged sword - in a throwaway script it's
awesome to not have to bother converting between the number 12 and the string
"12", both numeric and string operators will work on them the same way. In a
large project that kind of thing is just going to cause a bunch of untraceable
bugs due to unidentified invisible behavior. Or you need to resort to weird
hackarounds like "0 but true". Also: $_ is like that, only more so.

CPAN invented the software repository, and I'm glad it was there so
PyPI/Gems/NPM/etc. could learn from its mistakes.

Every few years I tried an alpha of Perl 6, but it was always too slow and
unstable to get anything real done, and it was always a totally different
implementation from the previous one I'd tried. Maybe this name change shows
they're getting serious now.

~~~
regularfry
Didn't CTAN predate CPAN?

~~~
bbanyc
It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially
too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update
packages and resolve dependencies, which AFAIK nobody else did at the time.
Even Linux package managers didn't get that until a couple years later.

------
rhabarba
May Perl 5 live forever. Amen.

------
droithomme
The naming is a very good idea since it really is a totally different language
and the numbering made it seem like an incremental upgrade. Whether it's too
late will remain to be seen. Also, now maybe there is space for an actual Perl
6! :-)

------
ram_rar
Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use
Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?

~~~
gillesjacobs
A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in
Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic
language technology research.

~~~
make3
.. in the old guard of language technology research I guess, because in my NLP
lab, no one knows the first thing about Perl (everything is done in Python)

~~~
proverbialbunny
More than that. I wrote my first machine learning project in Perl.

Perl 5 is better than Python in many ways, but worse in other ways. Raku seems
to have none of the downsides Perl 5 had, but all of the upsides. Raku looks
like it could be a valid replacement for Python in the ML space.

Also, back then, Perl 5 had better libraries than Python. Though, that was
quite a while ago.

------
smacktoward
Fifteen years too late. But I suppose better late than never.

~~~
rubinelli
Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the
language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice,
clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very
widely used in bioinformatics.

~~~
7thaccount
I don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete
until recently.

~~~
rz2k
"a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text
files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics" is a description
of Perl 5, not Perl 6.

Even if Perl 6 is completed, I don't think it is a practical workhorse for
many real world situations.

To me being able to create grammars in Perl 6 to parse text data sounds really
compelling. However, every time I have played around with them, Perl 6 has
been so slow, that I have reverted to using regular expressions in another
language.

------
codesections
One thing that fascinates me about Raku/Perl6 is how hard it leans into
object-oriented programming at a moment when so many other new languages seem
to be trending in a distinctly functional direction.

------
ksec
The Author point to [1] for reason for Raku instead of Camelia.

One thing that struck me,

 _12\. Both raku.com and raku.org are currently available._

I was surprised that a 4 letter .com or .org is still available. So I looked
it up and turns out to be not true.

And it was interesting half of the discussion had domain name availability as
factor.

[1] [https://github.com/perl6/problem-
solving/issues/81#issuecomm...](https://github.com/perl6/problem-
solving/issues/81#issuecomment-520216578)

~~~
Grinnz
raku.org is no longer available because it is controlled by the Raku project.

------
wodny
It will have quite interesting implications, especially for former Perl 5
syntax enthusiasts. One could say in Polish they "code in cancer" ("programuje
w raku").

~~~
thanatropism
Not "z raku"?

~~~
wodny
No. "Z raku" would mean that "raku" accompanies you and the play on words
would be gone because it would be either "programuje z raku" ("one is
accompanied by raku the programming language") or "programuje z rakiem"
("codes having/with cancer").

------
sys_64738
What utility does Perl provide in a world dominated by python?

~~~
ncmncm
Legit question.

Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you
thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is
also the only one that can use Postgres for storage.

I could not find any blog engine in Python.

~~~
smacktoward
There are static site generators written in Python you could use to publish a
blog, like Pelican
([https://blog.getpelican.com/](https://blog.getpelican.com/)) and Lektor
([https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/)). But yeah, if you
want software that works like WordPress and generates pages dynamically on the
fly, I'm not sure there's any good Python-based alternatives.

 _> If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse_

In fairness to PHP, it's a lot better today than it used to be. (Though modern
PHP would probably strike a Pythonista as too Java-ish.) And WordPress has had
tons of engineering resources poured into it for a decade-plus now, whereas
Movable Type has been maintained on a relative shoestring due to its fall from
popularity.

~~~
ncmncm
It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to generate blog pages on the fly,
but somehow it is what everyone does.

------
gpvos
Larry's actual approval (although he has basically said before that the
community doesn't need his approval anymore) is here:
[https://github.com/perl6/problem-
solving/pull/89#pullrequest...](https://github.com/perl6/problem-
solving/pull/89#pullrequestreview-300789072)

------
halis
[https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/DaSY-
sXB3xqiXQZImbypEvHPdec...](https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/DaSY-
sXB3xqiXQZImbypEvHPdec=/1092x0/2019/05/22/1b710a6b-5f4d-4987-a046-c23674b221a3/picard-
meme-facepalm.jpg)

------
x62Bh7948f
I used a workflow automation system at my previous gig that used java heavily
on the backend. Rakuraku Workflow was the name. I hated it. The name, that in
japanese means something like “easy easy” (楽々) didn’t help much. It was a
mess.

------
tus88
So will there be a Perl 6 then, or are Perl 5-ists stuck on that major version
forever?

~~~
spyspy
Apple and Microsoft have basically proven that you can jump major version
numbers and no one will really care.

------
mberning
I wish them the best of luck, but in my experience rebranding a seriously off
track project is often the treatment of last resort. It’s the vancomycin of
struggling projects.

------
kizer
Is that from the Bible?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Does not sound like anything from the Bible I have ever read. Theres other
commentary on this HN post about the many meanings of the name though.

~~~
vgetr
It is - the book of Matthew, specifically.

~~~
giancarlostoro
You're thinking of "Raca" from Matthew, it wouldn't make sense for him to call
it based on that verse though since it's not a pleasant word. Jesus
specifically says not to call your brother Raca. Why would he call his
language that...

------
lacampbell
Good move. The name 'Perl' has connotations (good or bad depending on who you
ask), but this language always seemed like a different kettle of fish.

Names matter.

------
blondin
so, raku is shortened for rakudo the perl compiler. rakudo itself might be
japanese but i can't confirm.

google, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't want to translate the word because
they think i am typing it wrong and they know exactly what i meant to type...
but anyways, i think it has to do with paradise or heaven, but i could be
wrong.

------
opens3
Hallelujah! Great decision :) it will give Raju a chance to be viewed without
the "line noise" lens of Perl 5.

~~~
DonHopkins
I'm disappointed they didn't take my suggestion to rename Perl 6 to
"$#_@;\>&%}`[*~!^)".

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I'm disappointed that's not executable. :)

------
janeroe
In Russian "raku" is a genitive of cancer / a derogatory term used for noob
users.

------
overcast
Can someone give the rest of us some context on this?

~~~
bifrost
Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious.

Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl
users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5.

FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

~~~
folkhack
In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be
ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling
for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs.

Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to
say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer
who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to
my career)

I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't
want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's
starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make
your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."

~~~
Touche
> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer
> with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career)

That's what programming is.

~~~
DonHopkins
False equivalence. I'd choose a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's
likely no longer with the company written in Python over Perl any day.

------
eruci
A long overdue marketing move.

------
guelo
If raku failed to catch on whilst it was named Perl it has even less chance to
catch on now.

------
dcompton13
raku is a type of pottery firing, also from Japan.

------
davidw
It would be cool if Les Claypool played Larry Wall in the movie.

------
7thaccount
Will Zoffix return?

~~~
7thaccount
Not sure how to edit, but for those who don't understand this comment, Zoffix
was a key Perl6 contributor who recently left because the community and Larry
Wall wouldn't change the name to something else like "Raku" among other things
I guess. Now that they have made this change, I'm curious if he'd ever come
back and start running the test suites again.

------
thetwentyone
Julia has a really great threading model coming in v1.3, which is likely to be
released this month:
[https://julialang.org/blog/2019/07/multithreading](https://julialang.org/blog/2019/07/multithreading)

It already supports a variety of parallel techniques but it's about to get
easier and safer (e.g. safe I/O).

~~~
SQueeeeeL
Is Julia getting more stable? I remember that was the big issue a few years
ago, especially since it calls so many weird CUDA apis.

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, that's what reaching 1.0 was supposed to represent, but I don't (get to)
use it (for the kind of work I do) so I cannot say for sure if that actually
worked out in practice.

~~~
ChrisRackauckas
There were packages I wanted to add features to last week that I've used daily
for years, and when I went to go check them out, I noticed they hadn't been
touched since the 1.0 release which is now over a year ago. So I think the
stability of 1.0 has worked out well since, in contrast to pre-1.0, these days
core packages don't even need maitanance and will still continue to work
perfectly well for years.

------
bipolar_lisper
the programming community never ceases to amaze me

------
harikb
[http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/13](http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/13) \- There is
so many good ideas to copy to Rustlang!

------
vinceguidry
This should have happened with Python 2/3.

~~~
cestith
I'm not sure I agree with you but I can't imagine why you're getting
downvoted. It's definitely an argument worth making.

~~~
vinceguidry
Nobody likes hearing their favorite language trashed.

------
anonu
Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late... I learned regex in perl so
the language will always have a soft spot in my heart. But Python has trounced
Perl for almost any task. There simply is no reason to learn perl unless youre
in the unfortunate position of managing some legacy stack.

~~~
jolmg
> But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task.

Well, I think Perl beats Python in quick and concise one-liners written from
the command line, doesn't it?

Not that I know much Perl, though.

~~~
petre
It does but it's still annoying to write on a line as opposed to Ruby or Lua.
Writing Python one liners with significant whitespace is out of the question I
guess.

~~~
snapdangle
Raku includes an incredible amount of new tools for writing one-liners.
Furthermore, you can convert your one-liner into a command line app simply by
wrapping the code in a `sub MAIN($pos-arg, :$named-arg) { ... }`.

~~~
petre
Yes but it has a VM penalty for at least more than 500 ms in my box, which is
kind if dissapointing.

