The Future of Perl
Why wouldn’t the future focus be on Raku at this point? Perl is (was?) a great language, but Raku offers so much more.<p>Of course Raku has the “expected” things from Perl like classes and all the fantastic regex and string manipulation features.<p>But Raku brings:<p>* Optional&#x2F;gradual typing (and unlike Python, declared types are enforced)<p>* Pattern matching, where different function definitions can be defined for different input values, like Haskell<p>* Multiple dispatch, so different function bodies can be defined for different sets of argument types (like pattern matching, but based on types, like Julia)<p>* Lazily-generated sequences, like Haskell or Clojure<p>* Lisp-like AST macros<p>* A built-in syntax for defining grammars and generating parsers<p>Not to mention junctions, autothreading, hyperoperators (vector operators), asynchronous operations, parallelism, concurrency, and multi-core support. The list goes on and on...<p>It’s unfortunate that so many programmers I talk to aren’t even willing to consider looking at Raku, even though it has a <i>lot</i> to offer.<p>But I am confused by this “future” where Perl wants to continue on to v7, v8...