Given the sense of humor the Raku devs seem to have, I'm surprised they didn't call it an incomplete complete course (as a working title)

Camel is rakuda. Raku means easy, comfortable, without trouble, etc.

Is Perl/Raku widely used these days? Are they worth learning? I've always been curious about those languages but I've had the impression that people are moving away from them.

I use both every day. The core perl5 packages I rely on are updated regularly. The perl5 runtime is released on a reliable schedule. Everything works.

I use raku mostly for fun. It has come a long way. It has further to go, but I don't mind. There is a surprising amount of vital packages already available for getting things done.

I don't think anyone believes perl5 will be as popular as it was years ago, or that raku will be a top-five language, but who cares? As long as the core community persists, its enough.

Learning Perl is worthwhile because it is ubiquitous on Unix-like systems and Perl-compatible regular expressions are the defacto standard regular expression syntax.

Perl may not be as popular now as it was in the past, but it is still around and lots of legacy systems that were written in Perl are still in active use.

But as Perl-compatible regular expressions are available in many other languages, this is not really a reason for learning Perl itself, right? Or am I missing some deeper insight into regexes, because I don't know Perl?

It is a matter of personal preference.

I find that regular expressions and text-wrangling tasks are faster and easier in Perl than in other programming languages due to its accessible syntax and regular expression engine speed.

This article shows the regular expression syntax in several popular programming languages: https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/regex/

This GitHub repo gives some regex performance test benchmarks: https://github.com/mariomka/regex-benchmark Perl is pretty fast among the scripting languages that were benchmarked.

If you are familiar with C / C++, then learning Perl is relatively fast and easy: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro

That's true, but it's worth mentioning that using the regexes in perl is quick and even fun to write. They are built-in to the language. some people find it very convenient.

Also the Perl community has been pushing the boundaries of regex and text processing generally.

If you find yourself in a place with frequent one-off text wrangling or Unix admin problems some Perl knowledge is worthwhile.

Raku is crammed with enough good, original ideas about programming languages that I would compare it to the "learning Lisp" meme in that it will probably reveal something new to you.

But as for usage, it's mostly legacy Perl codebases, which are much less interesting - Python and Ruby basically cover the same bases.

Really, probably not. Perl was mind blowing, productive, and super fun when your only other choices were C/C++ and bash/sed/awk. Most people eventually realized that There’s More Than One Way To Do It makes for code maintenance nightmares.

We use Raku for various things. For example, generating job workflows. It has an amazing type and object system.

In general no, but between the two: Raku is essentially used in nothing, so your time would be better spent learning Perl.

> Raku is essentially used in nothing, so your time would be better spent learning Perl.

Only if your goal is to be able to work on legacy codebases. Learning a cool language in itself is cool.

Also I'd prefer more than one subheading per page. That would make scrolling/wheeling through the content easier.

Looks like people can submit PRs: https://github.com/ash/raku-course

The good thing is that it is under a grant to get the work done. Should be interesting to watch it get fleshed out.