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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Haskell, GHC, hackage/cabal/whatever -- intentionally confusing? No, they are different things.

Those are all completely different words though... that's my point - that's the sensible way to do it.

> Raku is the language, Rakudo a compiler, and Rakudo Star a distribution

These all start with Raku. Can you understand how they'd be easy to mix up, rather than using different words like in the previous example?

> Giving three different things the same name would be much more confusing.

You've got the wrong end of the stick. I think they should have different names. I think at the moment their names are too similar.

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I do like the cleverness of it.

Raku is the language.

Rakudo = Raku “Do”

Rakudo Star = Rakudo* (i.e rakudo, rakudo-devel, rakudo-doc,…)

It has more linguistic cohesion that the tooling of a lot of languages.

Java, javac, java* seems totally normal. I feel like it’s because “Raku” sounds alien and so you don’t read Raku-do you read Rakudo because Raku “isn’t a word”.

> I do like the cleverness of it.

But that's the problem! I don't want clever, witty, whimsical. I want clear, simple, precise.

This is what went seriously wrong with Perl. In the 90s when Perl was doing well it was fashionable to be wacky like this. Then around 2000 the fashion suddenly changed and the industry grew up and people started to take things more seriously. Now Perl looks terribly out of date and silly.

> the industry grew up and people started to take things more seriously.

Really?

Goofy codenames for projects (Bionic Beaver, etc), the sign of a 'serious' project is having a cartoon mascot, 'open source' people relying on closed/proprietary things like slack, macOS, etc. instead of open/libre alternatives, 1 page github READMEs and API docs as 'documentation' but having a youtube channel full of 'howto' videos instead

there is probably an equal amount of goofyness/immaturity and seriousness then as now - it just manifests differently

> Really?

The programming language industry, yes. There was a marked shift towards simplicity away from silly whimsy. The extreme example is Go.

Then use a clear, simple, precise language; I think Java for instance, with the improvements in the last versions, could fit the bill.

Personally, I'm happy that we live in a time where we have many different languages featuring meny different paradigms; I find it refreshing and stimulating.

> Then use a clear, simple, precise language

I'm not in charge of what language the Perl projects choose to use.

> Personally, I'm happy that we live in a time where we have many different languages featuring meny different paradigms

You're not arguing against what anyone in this thread said.

Raku and Rakudo are different words.

“Raku” is the anglicized form of “楽”, which means “easy”. (It is also a form of pottery.)

“Rakuda do” is supposed to be “way of the camel”.

“Rakudo” is “Rakuda do” but shortened/portmanteau.

“Rakudo” is also supposed to mean “paradise”.

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I want to know how “easy” and “paradise” are not considered different words.

And “Rakudo Star” is the “Rakudo” compiler combined with a bunch of useful modules. So it makes a lot of sense for it to contain “Rakudo”, because it does indeed include “Rakudo”.

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It also makes a certain amount of sense that “Rakudo” is a thing which you use to “do” "Raku".

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