#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.
after a nuclear war, the remaining people will probably not be able to spin up a modern operating system on their improvised chips. How do you build a simple, reliable, legacy-free OS from scratch? What ideas đź’ˇ and techniques should be passed down to those people?
If we think hard enough about this, I think we’ll agree that closed-source systems are basically designed to be almost impossible for people outside the sponsoring organization to reproduce (for an example, consider [ReactOS](https://reactos.org/), which launched as [a project to produce a system compatible with Windows 95](https://reactos.org/wiki/FreeWin95) and [then changed to focus on Windows NT](https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS/History), and after more than 25 years, is still not capable of being a daily use system.
But we may also determine that most open-source systems are likewise not designed in such a way that reconstruction is viable. The Linux kernel is *huge* these days.
Additionally, in my opinion, they’d probably want to use programming languages designed for readability, ease of learning, and error-reduction first (that is, more like #COBOL than #C, more like #Java than #CPlusPlus, more like !Smalltalk and #Lisp / #Scheme than #Perl / #Raku and #JavaScript) and then performance and low-level access.
I think it is a mistake to assume that one could start with a modern version of #gcc or #llvm or #msvc … because it is not a given that the software itself and someone who knew how to use it (and update, modify, and adapt it) would still exist.
Not everything needs to be about “could this be useful in a job someday”, but many of my explorations are.
#Parrot was the original VM created for #Rakudo and other languages back when #Raku was still known as #Perl6 ... the early days of the P6 effort. http://www.parrot.org/ with no releases since 2016 and no activity in their repo since 2017.
I was just thinking (thanks to an #IRC discussion this morning) about breaking changes in programming languages and how often they split the community (or get rolled back, sometimes before an official release). Examples: #Perl 6 (now called #Raku) was originally a replacement for Perl 5, but became its own separate language (and I’m hearing that Perl 7 is facing rough sailing with the language’s community, too); #PHP 6, with radical changes that were scaled way down (PHP 6 was skipped, but later parts of the 5.x series and the 7.x series implemented some of the proposed changes). Then I come across this.
I was just on Parrot.org and reading about all the issues that led to its abandonment. No. As much as I want a real project with which to relearn C (and actually learn #DLang), this is not the time or the project.
#Parrot was originally designed to be a runtime for the Rakudo implementation of #Perl6 (now known as #Raku), but it crystalized too early, and became unable to adapt to Raku's changed needs. Several other scripting languages attempted to build implementations atop Parrot, but I think all such implementations are also dead. http://parrot.org/