A Complete Course of the Raku programming language

> Raku has a long way to go.

Agreed that both Raku (the language, community, and ecosystem) and Rakudo (the compiler) have a long way to go.

But whose who know them well know that there's still lots of low hanging fruit and it's "just" a matter of continuous improvement, year by year.

> stuck in a "we'll optimise that later" dead-end

That's a bit like saying Java (or rather the JVM) seemed to be stuck in being dog slow based on its dog slow performance in the first few years of its official existence. It paints a false picture.

In reality JVMs got faster each year, sometimes by big jumps, and 10 years after Java's first official release it was still slow, but no longer dog slow. (And nowadays Java is no longer considered slow.)

What matters is whether there is sustained love and continuous significant improvement of a PL, and an implementation. Raku has demonstrated that it has that for 20 years, and Rakudo for 10.

There is good reason to look forward to that continuing for both Raku and Rakudo until well beyond the point at which its raw string processing performance has become respectable.

And this will be in addition to what's remarkable about Raku's string handling, namely its world leading Unicode support and O(1) string indexing. Presuming that will finally pay off, and I see no reason to think it won't, it will seriously pay off.

> When jnthn's grammar debugger got really buggy and less actively maintained, that defeated one of the biggest reasons I had to use the language.

I created a couple PRs for the grammar debugger, one that fixed a bug, another that dramatically sped it up, but neither were merged. But imo that was appropriate; spending time on that debugger wasn't a good use of his time.

And now jnthn's work on grammar debugging in Comma is so vastly superior to the old debugger that it would imo be especially silly of him to use up his limited time continuing to pay attention to the old code. I'm curious whether you agree with that?

> Raku is different, and it deserves to see top caliber core development. It doesn't have that yet, and that's sad.

I agree it needs more than jnthn, but surely you agree that jnthn is top caliber?

He has a degree in CS, specializing in PLs, compilers, and VMs, so exactly the right focus for his core dev work. And the university he did his degree at was Cambridge, one of the world's top universities, especially in CS. And he was awarded the degree with honors.

In addition, he is a highly successful, highly paid enterprise systems consultant whose work on Rakudo in his limited spare time, in recent years augmented by occasional grant supported projects that pay less way less than his commercial rate, has always struck me as extraordinarily good.

I've always thought it would be wonderful to have two jnthns, but that we have to respect and appreciate what resources we do have, and let him work at a pace that doesn't burn him out while he continues to mentor the other core devs, as he has now for many years.

Would you say I'm missing something?

Imo, while both Perl and Raku are exemplars of extensible PLs in their own ways, Perl's approach is essentially a tower of hacks built on the wrong foundation while Raku's core concept[0] is built to last for decades, if not a century[1].

[0] https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda892...

[1] https://thenewstack.io/larry-walls-quest-100-year-programmin...

I was taught in school that `0.1` is rational. Afaik it isn't in any lisps. I think that's the point the GP was making.

That said, while making `0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3` come out as exactly zero, with a clean and principled way to avoid things going pathological when the denominator gets large, is nice, it's hardly one of Raku's "main contributions to the programming language design space that I probably haven't seen elsewhere?"! :)

I don't know much about Perl but am aware of Tau Station, which was launched a few months ago. I recall reading somewhere that it includes a new Perl codebase with approaching a million lines of well written modern code.[0]

Raku is a different language, a very young one that has its adoption-for-serious-applications curve mostly ahead of it. Thus you get articles like the advent one from a few weeks ago that seriously documents a serious Raku application in a notably unserious way.[1] It's apparently only 7K or 13K lines of code, depending how you count, but well written Raku code is typically a fraction of the length of well written Perl code, so there is that.[2]

[0] https://taustation.space/blog/category/technology/ [1] https://raku-advent.blog/2020/12/20/day-20-a-raku-in-the-wil... [2] https://p6steve.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/raku-vs-perl-save-7...