Is perl or "Raku" still used in serious new applications these days?
I'm not talking about gluing stuff together with scripts - I mean a large project operating wholly under it
I'm not talking about gluing stuff together with scripts - I mean a large project operating wholly under it
In Perl's case, it's not that the production-ready libraries and frameworks aren't there -- they are, and they are fast and stable and in some cases very sophisticated -- but simply that the community of developers likely to start a "serious new application" has passed Perl by for more modern (e.g., Rust, Elixir, Kotlin, Go even if its ideas are old) or ubiquitious (e.g. JS, Python) choices.
In Raku's case, there is not a deep bench of libraries and tools suitable for production.
In both cases, hiring for previous knowledge is not practical.
https://www.rexify.org/ -- an automation framework
https://mojolicious.org/ -- amazing web framework
https://metacpan.org/pod/DBIx::Class::Manual - amazing ORM
Unpack this for us... Do you mean commercial applications? If so, you can determine for yourself the small number of languages used for "serious applications".
If you mean data analysis, ETL, system administration, and general data reconstruction, I can't think of a faster, more appropriate language than Perl. Sed and awk are also powerful mainstays.
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...
But I think you are missing out, not just on Raku but on lots of cool stuff that is not being used "in serious applications".
There is time and place for boring tech, like when you are building a banking backend or something. But there is much more to life than churning out banking backends, and Raku is well suited for those other endeavors.