The IRC channel still exists! It's on libera.chat now, though.

Oh, I owe a lot to freenode and #haskell and #math in particular. I remember one of them ran a lecture on category theory, live. It was also there I first heard about Martin-Löf type theory.

It was such a great time and place for a young person interested in learning about Haskell.

Do you remember who ran it? I used to go to hack phi at UPenn, which attracted a significant chunk of the community.

The lecture? No, unfortunately.

Combinators (in the Haskell sense) have nothing to do with whether you write your functions with letters or with comic book swearing.

err, no

the perl6 guys ended up inventing the new perl (now renamed raku)

https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/raku-burritos/

the first perl6 parser (pugs) was written in Haskell btw

I'm aware. I was using the world pejoratively. Combinator style degrades into line noise.

no doubt its fashionable to think "perl == line noise == bad"

however, there are certain sub languages (slangs) where the use of punctuation chars as operators is very helpful, of course regex is the most compelling where the code is parsing one char at a time

  my regex url {
    ^                                # Start of line
    [<http> s? '://']                # Match http or https
    ['www.' ]?                       # Optional www.
    [<[\w\-]>+ '.' ]+                # One or more domain segments
    <[a..z]> ** 2..6                 # TLD, 2 to 6 lowercase letters
    [ '/' <[\w\-./?%&=]>* ]?         # Optional path/query
    $                                # End of line
  }

imo raku has improved the situation a lot by introducing "regex 2.0" with deep support for unicode and with built in grammars that can work smoothly with regex

Ahh not sure I agree. The reputation for being unreadable is pretty well deserved. It didn't happen for no reason.

ok - I agree that there was a culture of golfing and obscurity in some sections of the perl coder base

it was inevitable that a simpler language - Python - would take the big slice of scripters who wanted something easier to learn and to read

I'm sad that perl no longer has a credible niche for script level coders who want to learn a more powerful and more expressive language than Python ...