On tonight's phone call with #sonTwo, we were discussing some of my learning activities, because I mentioned that I need to start exploring using AI / LLM. I mentioned that I'd purchased "Raku Fundamentals" and that so far, it seems to be written for someone who uses programming languages a lot more consistently than I do.

#Raku is a descendant of #Perl (same creator; indeed Raku was originally Perl6, but by the time it was released, most people were aware it was a completely different language, so they eventually changed its name).

I've pretty much not used Perl in twenty years (I used it once in a project at work about 18 years ago, as part of a report processing pipeline, alongside #Python, Windows #Batch, and #KiXtart), so the demo programs seem to have purposes that are too large for language starters. I feel like it is supposed to glue itself onto "oh, I know that from Perl!" memories, but I don't remember Perl.

What I remember most was that I liked it a lot when I learned it (college class), but as soon as I started trying to use it in real life I found that "there's more than one way to do it" equals "write once, read never". I used it in that pipeline because it excels at what I needed it to do (text processing) which helped take an ever-growing log file and find relevant events from the past day ... and because I knew the script would never need to be edited.