I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?
[1] https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.htm...
Raku doesn't seem to have the same ubiquity, while Python is generally available on any system, or even Perl5 is still widely available on pretty much any system. I'd love to start using Raku more but it seems like a hard sell over Python or Bash
Regarding regexes, Raku introduces a whole new syntax, makes whitespace non-meaningful by default, and allows regexes to be named and then composed/reused. Those three changes, along with helpful modules like Grammar::Tracer, make reading and writing regexes a totally different experience. It's still going to look like noise at first, of course, but even then the syntax parallels normal code far better than PCREs, so you're more likely to make a correct guess about what something means.
Regarding your oath, it's been 10 years and perhaps you are better now at learning language features. Raku's documentation is very good ... but a very different format that perl. And raku doubled down on regex documentation and structuring ideas (which are completely applicable to refactoring somebody else's regex). And the usual forums are excellent at helping with raku questions.
Do you still know what the reason was?
Here's what I sent:
Hello!
I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search.
DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube.
As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl. Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice? Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6?
Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email. DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work!
-Thomas Gebert.
Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)
Thank you!
It takes time to build very large projects like a large, layered programming language, and it should be normal to take many years to learn all the features of something like perl or raku. Because there should be no reason to do it all at once rather than be productive in the meantime.
So anyway, 6 years should not be much in the career of a programming language.