<story><title>Raku: A language for gremlins</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/raku-a-language-for-gremlins/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:&lt;p&gt;1. How much should the language surprise you?&lt;p&gt;2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;              surprising
                   ^
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    delight &amp;lt;------+------&amp;gt; horrify
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                   v
              unsurprising
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it&amp;#x27;s a delight.&lt;p&gt;Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It&amp;#x27;s like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, &amp;quot;Yes, it&amp;#x27;s weird. Isn&amp;#x27;t that grand!&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>The problem is those are subjective axes. And things can both delight and horrify; I wrote some javascript once where I did document.write = function ... which is kind of delightful in that I was able to do what I needed as a result, but also pretty horrifying :)&lt;p&gt;Other people I showed it to felt it was more on the horrifying side, but like I said, it&amp;#x27;s subjective.</text></comment>
<story><title>Raku: A language for gremlins</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/raku-a-language-for-gremlins/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:&lt;p&gt;1. How much should the language surprise you?&lt;p&gt;2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;              surprising
                   ^
                   |
                   |
                   |
    delight &amp;lt;------+------&amp;gt; horrify
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   v
              unsurprising
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it&amp;#x27;s a delight.&lt;p&gt;Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It&amp;#x27;s like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, &amp;quot;Yes, it&amp;#x27;s weird. Isn&amp;#x27;t that grand!&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cogman10</author><text>I mean, it was &amp;quot;Perl 6&amp;quot; so is it really surprising that Perl devs wanted a language that looks nothing like any other language?&lt;p&gt;Perl has it&amp;#x27;s own healthy share of &amp;quot;delightful surprises&amp;quot; and Raku was mostly designed to eliminate perl&amp;#x27;s horrifying surprises.</text></comment>