I got permanently banned from the Raku community rather silently. What happened, what is the common history, and honestly, what is the path forward for those who stay.

This post is mostly meant to reach out to the community itself from this exiled state - therefore generic Raku banter isn't very welcome, and neither are further invalidation attempts from the people personally involved in my ban: they have had plenty of representation and there is no reason to assume we can have a meaningful discourse.

It's a bit ironic that now we went down the static rabbit hole so much that we don't realize it's more the opposite: by adding more to your language and compiler to enforce static checks, you turn the compiler itself more and more into a runtime that you are just going to run ahead of time, according to a potentially vastly different set of rules compared to your real runtime. There is no reason why you couldn't do something like this by will but it's just not worth it after a certain point clearly.

I wonder where you got that impression from. For me as well, it's rather the overboard lecturing response that seemed like an invocation of "Trevors axiom".

By the way, what even defines "simply a blog post"? That's just a media format that doesn't say much about the content itself, does it? I do agree with the sentiment that it would have been good to know what the article is even going to be. Not even the paragraphs were very helpful in this regard. It does improve the reception of an article if it meets the intended audience.

In retrospect, this article is mostly about a basic compiler frontend language and how to bootstrap that into a fully-featured concatenative programming language. Which to me personally is a "hm, okay, interesting" kind of thing but I didn't read the article for this premise. I read it for the "new antisyntax language" and feel it was clickbaitish.

Some diversity doesn't hurt, though. On my keyboard, it's actually easier to type than the backslash for starters.

Maybe a fast way but is it a fair or even helpful way, if you recognize that it "quickly became a bad name for the project"?

It is helpful for people who were paying attention to the perl community with any passing interest at any time in the past 20 years. It is not helpful for people who weren't. But the former describes a lot of people here.

Absolutely! In the same way that saying the "Dugong Dugon" is a type of fish even though it's technically a Sirenia.

Here, "some swimming creature" is the totality of the objective, we aren't trying to do a crash course in marine zoology or trying to explain what a Sirenia is or what a fish technically means.

Saying it's perl-6 means that it's not say, lisp-like or some kind of prolog or haskell. It's a relatively swift approximation and that's the totality of the objective.

So following your logic, "some of the worst" includes the vast majority of actually used languages and tools. Must be cool to be on the special side. :)

Taking a look at the bigger picture, it does indeed seem like the Perl philosophy lost to the Python philosophy overall.

Looking at the hip n cool languages, not just Python for scripting but surely Go and to some extent Rust as well for native stuff (Dart for scripting also but it didn't outright "win"), these are mostly languages that deliberately simplified things. Yes, even Rust - it needs to be compared to C++ and its biggest feature is basically that it doesn't let you do all the things C++ does, within a very similar model.

The only language that I heard is going against these trends (but I'm largely clueless what it's actually like) is Julia which sort of has its own "lay" niche like Perl did back in the day, and is mostly winning based on the premise that it's a performant scientific language.

The industry obsesses over costs of adoption, stability, maintenance; in short: how to get the most out of the least actual new development. It does make quite a lot of sense, to be honest, although sometimes it's really demotivating at an individual level.

And frankly, "learn the language, duh" usually comes up when the language is complex or unintuitive for no practical purpose. Of course there will be people who always complain if they have to learn anything but I don't think they make the majority, or even a significant minority, in the software engineering world. "Learning the language" is only as much of a virtue as the language itself serves its purpose, which includes easy of use and the readability of someone else's code.

From what I heard, it half inspired Moose actually.

Are you sure it wasn't the Meta Object Protocol (MOP) rather than Moose? "A MOP for Perl" inspired endless debate but never amounted to much. In the end I think the Perl 5 community felt it was best left to Perl 6 but I could be wrong as this was all about 20 years ago.

I don't know, this is "second-hand intel" for me, pretty sure I read it in a very old article from someone of the likes of Carl Mäsak, Moritz Lenz or another early-day Rakudo contributor...

Have to agree with this one, and also, there is something that I think is easy to forget until you actually face code that has been worked on by dozens of people of completely random backgrounds, over decades: your wisdom doesn't necessarily coincide with someone else's wisdom. Context switching across people - and especially people who barely have anything in common - can be really troublesome. You have to know everything that somebody else you work with has ever used.

Yes, and those claims might have even been real (also, Perl still lags behind on Unicode stuff, or so I heard?)... the thing we like much less to talk about is that there just needs to be somebody to make those optimizations happen. Work on the actual bytecode VMs (or rather just MoarVM at this point) has been desperately lacking.

Is Jonathan Worthington still active within the project? He was the original force behing optimisation if I remember.

Jonathan Worthington has been much going on and off in the recent years. He still had one big optimization project that got completed in 2021 - the new dispatch mechanism - but I don't know about the benchmarks and I doubt it would help with the shear throughput of basic data processing.