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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late... I learned regex in perl so the language will always have a soft spot in my heart. But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task. There simply is no reason to learn perl unless youre in the unfortunate position of managing some legacy stack.

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> Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late...Python has trounced Perl for almost any task.

Moving forward I'm assuming you're talking about Raku and not about Perl (or Perl 5).

Do you mean little too late to be endorsed by a multi-million company? Or little too late for everything (personal projects, academia, etc.)? I'm trying to clarify this because I've never understood this sailed ship mentality regarding programming languages. And I know you're not saying this but it almost sounds like Raku is supposed to be a replacement for Python. It isn't. They're different languages, both good in some areas and bad in other areas. These areas need not be necessarily overlapping.

Whenever I read this kind of comments, they always remind of the following phrase I came across:

    There are two things that a programming language needs to be acceptable:
        - Be Python
        - Be a language I have used recently

It's almost as if Python marks the pinnacle of programming language research which isn't the case at all. In fact, I daresay no language can since programming languages are a matter of compromises and trade-offs. A language's compromises and trade-offs you're willing to put off with might not be the same for another person. There's an interesting phenomenon I've observed in the Perl community (or at least the Raku for the most part) which seems to be rare in other places: Whenever a situation arises where Raku might not be the best candidate for, community members aren't afraid to consider/suggest/recommend other programming languages as viable options.

> But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task.

Well, I think Perl beats Python in quick and concise one-liners written from the command line, doesn't it?

Not that I know much Perl, though.

It does but it's still annoying to write on a line as opposed to Ruby or Lua. Writing Python one liners with significant whitespace is out of the question I guess.

Raku includes an incredible amount of new tools for writing one-liners. Furthermore, you can convert your one-liner into a command line app simply by wrapping the code in a `sub MAIN($pos-arg, :$named-arg) { ... }`.

Yes but it has a VM penalty for at least more than 500 ms in my box, which is kind if dissapointing.

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