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Comment by deckiedan | Hacker News Reader

I think Raku ( https://raku.org/ )[1] is a facinating "hobby" language - taking a lot of the Ruby "optimised for joy" stuff to a whole different place (leaving a lot of the ruby simplicity and going for sheer raw power and brevity, at the expense of the learning curve and density).

It's really interesting to check out if you want something really powerful and able to hack stuff up quickly / differently.

And all the perl languages definitely have some of that "we code in C for boring stuff, but need something fun and powerful for what we enjoy" ethic.

There was a blog post at one point somewhere talking about a supposed divide between "East coast" and "West coast" languages, which I can't find right now...

[1] It was called "Perl 6" once upon a time...

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The decision took a month ago to focus on Raku as my hobby language and learning since then so much about programming and different ways to do stuff is refreshing. The language is well thought and if some stuffs are note yet possible (like using grammars for binary data for example). I think the last time, I felt that a language is providing you a new world to play with it is when I discovered Racket.

I used Python and R mostly in work environment and always wished to leverage Julia. The overlaps between Julia and Raku made me realize how to do some stuff and have a better grasp on some Julia capabilities that where perceived as fuzzy concepts. Multi-dispatch for example but also the parallel between NativeCall in Raku and the C API access in Julia. Even if we fall more in the two languages fallacy with it, it is crazy to see how it is easy to provides binding for C, C++, Fortran or Rust libraries to Raku.

Besides that Raku is a joyful/fun language that does not block you if you want to do serious stuffs with it. For that did not come form nowhere. At each FOSDEM edition, I was always peaking for some talks in the Scheme/Raku/Perl room and each time enjoying the talks and the possibilities discovered. I was there in 2015 at FOSDEM when Larry Wall made the official announcement for Perl6, I saw a few talks by Andrew Shitov and others.

In these times where you find a load of articles "learn foo in X minutes", I really like to read more about Raku with the feeling I am "learning Raku for a lifetime".

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I really think that the parallel between what Raku and Julia have got right from the syntax and the integration of unicode, the lisp-ish nature, etc. Julia even got a few more think as having a AST and macro around it (coming in Raku when the RakuAST branch will lend later this year), using GMP binding for arbitrary arithmetic (maybe coming to Raku/do soon).

Raku like Julia have this Lisp feeling where everything is possible to reproduce due to the flexibility of their inner working.

Actually, I've been working with getting grammars for binary data working in Raku. Development paused though when I had some trouble working with slangs.

I've gotten a bit better with them since then, but now I'm holding off for RakuAST, else I'd probably be rewriting a large amount of code for nothing (or have some major performance hits). You can see the proposal at https://gist.github.com/alabamenhu/2fec7a8f51a24091dc1b104a2... and a very early implementation at https://github.com/alabamenhu/BinexObjex

Definitely read over the proposal and comments, as my work with binary formats is a drop the bucket of ways to work with them, and I'm always interested in hearing how others would need/use such a feature.

> "East coast" and "West coast" languages

I don't know about the blog but afaik the notion arose from "Worse is better".[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

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