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Re: Scripting languages

=> Schmiddi’s Blog: Scripting Languages

Disclaimer: I use and love Perl but I have not (yet) started using Raku (née Perl6).

I think it’s useful to think of Raku as the part of the Perl community that embraced Perl’s “playful”, Lisp-like nature, as opposed to the part that appreciated it for being a better shell. Depending on what your goals are, Raku might be a bit too unstructured.

I’m saying that because Perl has always been a language that doesn’t impose much order on how you code. Perl programmers embrace TMTOWTDI[1] with abandon, and unlike Pythonistas who fret endlessly about “idiomatic Python”, doing your own thing as a Perl coder is almost a badge of honor. This is Perl’s great strength - and weakness.

These statements each increase the variable $y by one if $x is zero.

# straight if
if ( $x == 0 ) { $y++ }
# reversed if
$y++ if $x == 0;
# unless
$y++ unless $x != 0;
# regex!
$y++ if $x =~ m/0/;

The first 2 are functionally identical and Perl doesn’t care what you choose. The unless example is silly here but is nice if you need a negated if. And regex is deep in Perl’s DNA - but please, use them with moderation.

I believe Raku has the makings of a really nice language, that might even displace Perl from its (currently quite small) niche. But it’s also clear to me that for bigger teams, bondage-and-discipline languages like Python have the edge.

—

[1] There’s More Than One Way To Do It!

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