Raku: A language for gremlins

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:

1. How much should the language surprise you?

2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?

              surprising
                   ^
                   |
                   |
                   |
    delight  horrify
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   v
              unsurprising

Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it's a delight.

Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It's like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, "Yes, it's weird. Isn't that grand!"

Raku is interesting as a language indeed.

I can't get over some of the idioms, they just don't map nicely in my head. The same reason AppleScript struck me as weird, it trys to use natural language on one hand (e.g. `my`, `say`, `sub`, `gather`) with some oddities like `@` being used for (assuming?) scoped iterations or declaring modules[0] and some other from-an-outsider byzantine syntax decisions. For instance, I can logic this out, mostly, but it would not feel intuitive to me to "discover":

```

   my @bottles = (flat ((99...2) X~ ' bottles'),
              '1 bottle',
              'no more bottles',
              '99 bottles');

   my @actions = (flat 'Take one down and pass it around' xx 99,
              'Go to the store and buy some more');

     for flat @bottles Z @actions Z @bottles[1..*] {
       say "$^a of beer on the wall, $^a of beer.
   $^b, $^c of beer on the wall.\n".tc;
  }

```

These idioms don't click for me intuitively. Its a very symbol heavy language and the symbols often appear to be overloaded by context.

All to say, its okay! different languages isn't a bad thing, however I can't say that I'd use Raku even if it was the best fit for something, like say, a natural language parser (which based on all evidence Perl / Raku is really good at building parsers)

[0]: https://examples.raku.org/categories/module-management/Fletc...

When I was looking at the language, I didn't find the documentation "really poor". In fact I was impressed at how much of a one-stop-shop the official docs site was for both conceptual docs and API docs.

https://docs.raku.org/

Look at the following page as a jumping off point for conceptual stuff. Absolutely top class:

https://docs.raku.org/language

C++!

The first footnote says that Raku was formerly known as Perl 6.