What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy, and they now came along and said: "Listen up, everybody! We finally did it! It has a 16 bit processor now instead of 8 and 4 bit shades of green instead of 2, but it won't play any of your GameBoy games; you'll have to write new ones." -- If they did that, then being a hobby for a small number of true weirdos is the only way they could hope to fit into 2026. That's what Raku feels like to me.
> What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy
More like Nintendo took 35 years to release the "VideoGameGirl", a product with a completely different names, and then suddenly a bunch of die-hard GameBoy fans are complaining that this separate product, even if it shares origin with the GameBoy, somehow doesn't run games made for a different console.
That's how this Perl/Raku navelgazing feels like to me.
Not everything, but languages do serve a purpose tied to how many (and which) people speak them, and that's true for general purpose programming languages in the same way as for human languages. If learning Klingon is someone's "thing" then, well, everyone can judge for themselves whether the predicate "true weirdo" applies or not, but it's descriptive enough.
lol - I guess there is no defence for the long delays in getting Perl6 out of the door (2000-2015) and for sure that Osborned perl (5) and created a justified reaction from the perl community who wished that it had never happened. Thus the (slow) divorce with this being the decree nisi.
Turns out that Larry (and the team) were much better at language design than project management.
That said, since 2015 we have been blessed with an awesome new language.
Context: Raku was formerly Perl 6; it was renamed in October 2019 for compatibility reasons.
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
A driving motivation for the immediate formation of The Raku Foundation in a country in the European Union is the Cyber Resilience Act, which will make it mandatory for any software that is sold or licensed in the European Union to define its dependencies, to have a mechanism for reporting and fixing faults, and establishes legal responsibility for those who sell software. This has major consequences for FOSS developers, which the EU has taken into account, by creating a new category of entity called Open-source software steward.
As to why NL:
So you gotta choose an EU nation - the choice of NL was really a convenience (the main driver of the project lives there), but NL also has innate strengths as a home as is pretty neutral choice (ie not France, Germany) and a lot of SWE talent and good English speaking skills (even if the legal docs are in local language).
What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy, and they now came along and said: "Listen up, everybody! We finally did it! It has a 16 bit processor now instead of 8 and 4 bit shades of green instead of 2, but it won't play any of your GameBoy games; you'll have to write new ones." -- If they did that, then being a hobby for a small number of true weirdos is the only way they could hope to fit into 2026. That's what Raku feels like to me.
> What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy
More like Nintendo took 35 years to release the "VideoGameGirl", a product with a completely different names, and then suddenly a bunch of die-hard GameBoy fans are complaining that this separate product, even if it shares origin with the GameBoy, somehow doesn't run games made for a different console.
That's how this Perl/Raku navelgazing feels like to me.
Not everything needs to be a mainstream movement, and not being one doesn’t automatically make you a “true weirdo”.
Not everything, but languages do serve a purpose tied to how many (and which) people speak them, and that's true for general purpose programming languages in the same way as for human languages. If learning Klingon is someone's "thing" then, well, everyone can judge for themselves whether the predicate "true weirdo" applies or not, but it's descriptive enough.
lol - I guess there is no defence for the long delays in getting Perl6 out of the door (2000-2015) and for sure that Osborned perl (5) and created a justified reaction from the perl community who wished that it had never happened. Thus the (slow) divorce with this being the decree nisi.
Turns out that Larry (and the team) were much better at language design than project management.
That said, since 2015 we have been blessed with an awesome new language.
I got 502 bad gateway. Then a register page. With a section about "Cyber Resilience Act".
That section is worth a read in my opinion.
Context: Raku was formerly Perl 6; it was renamed in October 2019 for compatibility reasons.
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)
You know what my favourite Perl joke is, invented it myself, raku is a Japanese lisp :D
A "risupu", per Google Translate.
And the original blog post from almost a year ago: https://dev.to/lizmat/towards-a-raku-foundation-3ne2
The link isn't working for me - anyone else?
Hm, are you on a VPN? Some hosters react bitchy to those.
see also https://dev.to/lizmat/a-year-later-a-trf-1lh0 for some history and perspective
I looked through this article but wasn't able to find why it was decided to establish it in Netherlands (under the Dutch law). Could someone share it?
The site explains "why the EU" as follows:
A driving motivation for the immediate formation of The Raku Foundation in a country in the European Union is the Cyber Resilience Act, which will make it mandatory for any software that is sold or licensed in the European Union to define its dependencies, to have a mechanism for reporting and fixing faults, and establishes legal responsibility for those who sell software. This has major consequences for FOSS developers, which the EU has taken into account, by creating a new category of entity called Open-source software steward.
As to why NL:
So you gotta choose an EU nation - the choice of NL was really a convenience (the main driver of the project lives there), but NL also has innate strengths as a home as is pretty neutral choice (ie not France, Germany) and a lot of SWE talent and good English speaking skills (even if the legal docs are in local language).
Haven't double-checked, but I'm assuming lizmat (one of the people spearheading the effort) still lives there, so that might be all there is to it.
Good read, thanks.