Is Perl/Raku widely used these days? Are they worth learning? I've always been curious about those languages but I've had the impression that people are moving away from them.
I use both every day. The core perl5 packages I rely on are updated regularly. The perl5 runtime is released on a reliable schedule. Everything works.
I use raku mostly for fun. It has come a long way. It has further to go, but I don't mind. There is a surprising amount of vital packages already available for getting things done.
I don't think anyone believes perl5 will be as popular as it was years ago, or that raku will be a top-five language, but who cares? As long as the core community persists, its enough.
Learning Perl is worthwhile because it is ubiquitous on Unix-like systems and Perl-compatible regular expressions are the defacto standard regular expression syntax.
Perl may not be as popular now as it was in the past, but it is still around and lots of legacy systems that were written in Perl are still in active use.
But as Perl-compatible regular expressions are available in many other languages, this is not really a reason for learning Perl itself, right? Or am I missing some deeper insight into regexes, because I don't know Perl?
I find that regular expressions and text-wrangling tasks are faster and easier in Perl than in other programming languages due to its accessible syntax and regular expression engine speed.
This GitHub repo gives some regex performance test benchmarks: https://github.com/mariomka/regex-benchmark Perl is pretty fast among the scripting languages that were benchmarked.
That's true, but it's worth mentioning that using the regexes in perl is quick and even fun to write. They are built-in to the language. some people find it very convenient.
Raku is crammed with enough good, original ideas about programming languages that I would compare it to the "learning Lisp" meme in that it will probably reveal something new to you.
But as for usage, it's mostly legacy Perl codebases, which are much less interesting - Python and Ruby basically cover the same bases.
Really, probably not. Perl was mind blowing, productive, and super fun when your only other choices were C/C++ and bash/sed/awk. Most people eventually realized that There’s More Than One Way To Do It makes for code maintenance nightmares.
