alt Hacker NewsI agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.
Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.
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citrin_ru • 07/31/2025
> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl
When I still used Perl (10y ago) Ruby was notably slower on many tasks. Ruby probably the slowest among popular script languages.
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> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl.
I don't think I ever thought about it but I think I have implicitly taken this to heart since I last was using Perl seriously. Almost every engineering org I've worked for in the last decade has had Ruby as a part of its stack for e.g. scripting or lambdas and it's what I reach for when I need to script something. And I've done Rails work in a few orgs too, which has few parallels in its niche even without considering Perl.
Although I suspect for most people Python is where they land if we're just talking about scripting or hacking something together...or anything (I hate it but it is what it is lol).