I can't get over some of the idioms, they just don't map nicely in my head. The same reason AppleScript struck me as weird, it trys to use natural language on one hand (e.g. `my`, `say`, `sub`, `gather`) with some oddities like `@` being used for (assuming?) scoped iterations or declaring modules[0] and some other from-an-outsider byzantine syntax decisions. For instance, I can logic this out, mostly, but it would not feel intuitive to me to "discover":
```
my @bottles = (flat ((99...2) X~ ' bottles'),
'1 bottle',
'no more bottles',
'99 bottles');
my @actions = (flat 'Take one down and pass it around' xx 99,
'Go to the store and buy some more');
for flat @bottles Z @actions Z @bottles[1..*] {
say "$^a of beer on the wall, $^a of beer.
$^b, $^c of beer on the wall.\n".tc;
}
```
These idioms don't click for me intuitively. Its a very symbol heavy language and the symbols often appear to be overloaded by context.
All to say, its okay! different languages isn't a bad thing, however I can't say that I'd use Raku even if it was the best fit for something, like say, a natural language parser (which based on all evidence Perl / Raku is really good at building parsers)
Let me guess, you were never a Perl programmer? Trust me, if you have a Perl background, a lot of that syntax looks pretty familiar (the @ sigil in particular denotes an array).
I think all programming languages look alien if you’re unfamiliar with their syntax.
Having come from a Pascal background, C felt weird with all of its curly braces. Then after getting familiarity with C and its ilk, Python felt weird. In fact one of the reasons I was reluctant to learn Python was because I was good enough at Perl that I didn’t see the need to learn Python. I had a similar repulsion to LISP too, until I learned s-expressions and now I can see beauty in LISPs too.
Bar for esoteric languages, whose goals are typically different from a general purpose language, most languages are designed to be useful. So once you spend a little time in it you do start to appreciate some of syntactical quirks you once perceived as ugliness
…or at least that’s been my experience with most languages (and I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years)
Which isn't surprising, because Perl was originally designed to be a replacement for shell as a scripting language. So, it borrowed lots of stuff from shell scripting, and if you've spent lots of time in bash, awk, sed, etc, then elements of Perl (and Raku) will look very familiar.
I can't get over some of the idioms, they just don't map nicely in my head. The same reason AppleScript struck me as weird, it trys to use natural language on one hand (e.g. `my`, `say`, `sub`, `gather`) with some oddities like `@` being used for (assuming?) scoped iterations or declaring modules[0] and some other from-an-outsider byzantine syntax decisions. For instance, I can logic this out, mostly, but it would not feel intuitive to me to "discover":
```
```These idioms don't click for me intuitively. Its a very symbol heavy language and the symbols often appear to be overloaded by context.
All to say, its okay! different languages isn't a bad thing, however I can't say that I'd use Raku even if it was the best fit for something, like say, a natural language parser (which based on all evidence Perl / Raku is really good at building parsers)
[0]: https://examples.raku.org/categories/module-management/Fletc...