Raku

I would describe the Raku programming language as imagine all possible syntax sugar you could imagine or not imagine, and it will be in Raku. Or you can add it to with ease. (The Raku website has many great examples.)

And I find that such a simple statement, but it does not give a picture how this actually looks like. Showing is always more powerful than telling. But experiencing something is even more powerful than seeing something.

Raku has so good design decisions that I find it weird that so little people use it. There is no killer framework, killer tool that would scream this is the reason you should use the language. For me, I see the whole package as the killer feature.

Before I learned about Raku, Common Lisp was the closes to a programming language as a whole was the killer feature. I thought that most features of Common Lisp are tide to S-Expressions to parenthesis and the way of symbolic computation.

In reality Raku has the same and even more than Common Lisp.

Ecosystem

To be fair the ecosystem for Raku is much, much smaller than in other languages. If you aren’t ready to write some basic libraries yourself for your needs than Raku is not a good choice for you.

Windows Support

But there is quite the elephant in the room and that is Windows support. While Raku works fine on the surface. The ecosystem will probably not. Many popular libraries are not tested for windows and will most likely crash with weird errors. On Linux the experience is more friction less.