Brief rant about raku (what used be called Perl 6)

[Bob Proulx]

Brian Sturgill wrote:
> I'll make the rant brief: Raku (the new name for Perl 6) is VERY fat.
> No way in the world it's ready for production.

I'll just say thank goodness that Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) is
officially no longer the upgrade path from Perl 5.  It has diverged so
much from the core values that it is now considered a completely
independent language.  Raku is now considered as just another language
in the Perl family.  Because it uses the same backend.

I was following along with Perl 6 development and didn't think the
changes were terrible.  Although I have no idea why they decided to
replace "print" with "say".  In Raku you don't print things you say
things.  But otherwise it seemed acceptable.

Right up until they broke the regular expression engine!  The PCRE is
literally Perl Compatible Regular Expressions and has been adopted as
the defacto standard syntax for modern regular expressions.  And the
Perl 6 folks decided to change it in many incompatible ways.  Ways
that to my eye just seemed egregious.  It wasn't better.  It was
simply different.

So I am very happy that Raku is the new name, that it is no longer
called Perl, and that it is no longer the heir apparent for Perl.  Use
Raku if you want.  It's not Perl.  Only time will tell if Raku gains
any popularity or not.  At this point Perl 5 is continuing development
and continuing incremental improvements.

For at least a while there was talk that the next version would be 11.
Because, "It goes all of the way to 11."  And because 5 + 6 = 11.
Where would programming be without the jokes?

Bob