What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy, and they now came along and said: "Listen up, everybody! We finally did it! It has a 16 bit processor now instead of 8 and 4 bit shades of green instead of 2, but it won't play any of your GameBoy games; you'll have to write new ones." -- If they did that, then being a hobby for a small number of true weirdos is the only way they could hope to fit into 2026. That's what Raku feels like to me.
Context: Raku was formerly named Perl 6; it was renamed in October 2019 for compatibility reasons.
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy, and they now came along and said: "Listen up, everybody! We finally did it! It has a 16 bit processor now instead of 8 and 4 bit shades of green instead of 2, but it won't play any of your GameBoy games; you'll have to write new ones." -- If they did that, then being a hobby for a small number of true weirdos is the only way they could hope to fit into 2026. That's what Raku feels like to me.
You know what my favourite Perl joke is, invented it myself, raku is a Japanese lisp :D
A "risupu", per Google Translate.
Context: Raku was formerly named Perl 6; it was renamed in October 2019 for compatibility reasons.
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)
And the original blog post from almost a year ago: https://dev.to/lizmat/towards-a-raku-foundation-3ne2
The link isn't working for me - anyone else?
Hm, are you on a VPN? Some hosters react bitchy to those.
see also https://dev.to/lizmat/a-year-later-a-trf-1lh0 for some history and perspective
I looked through this article but wasn't able to find why it was decided to establish it in Netherlands (under the Dutch law). Could someone share it?