Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?
Not only that, but when Perl 5 was at the end of its life, comparing its libraries to both Python and Ruby, you'd often find the best library was for Perl.
Raku should be far faster than Python and Ruby and may in the future have better libraries with excellent concurrency support, making it a good choice to do processing over the data, not just converting it to the format you need. It has an easy interface with C and C++, so you can import libraries from there too, if you need more speed.
Before Python came to fame Perl was primarily used by two groups: 1) sys admins who needed bash style 1 liners, but in a cleaner language (This is where the dirty code stereotype comes from.) and 2) Web devs. Much of the early pre PHP internet and even post PHP internet was written in Perl. When Perl on hiatus the web world turned into this mess of frameworks like it is today. It used to be a more unified world.
And then there is the rare 3rd group. I worked on earlier ML projects in Perl before Python was a thing. I enjoyed Perl more than Python and so did the people around me. Moving to Python / R was somewhat painful knowing it could have been better. I hope Raku takes up this torch and is good as it appears to be.
For instance, [1] is a tool for text-to-pictograph translation system I worked on. The core engine is entirely written in Perl 5.
Perl 5 is better than Python in many ways, but worse in other ways. Raku seems to have none of the downsides Perl 5 had, but all of the upsides. Raku looks like it could be a valid replacement for Python in the ML space.
Also, back then, Perl 5 had better libraries than Python. Though, that was quite a while ago.
Still have my O'Reilly 1st Annual Perl Conference bag around. Good times.
raku is a great language to work with for us. it is feature rich, has good abstractions, and developer friendly. if you like the syntax then give it a try.
But you have parser libraries that work very well in all major languages, and I'm not sure being integrated in the language makes Raju more valid for any project.
What it does, imo, is offer a special way to solve some stuff by already being there. But it's like saying someone would choose python for a project because it has a built-in set data type.