A pivot way from cargo cult programming and excessive containerization towards simplicity and the fewest dependencies possible for a given task.

Too many projects look like a jinga tower gone horribly wrong. This has significant maintainability and security implications.

I’m surprised no one has picked either macro assembly on their favorite ISA or, perhaps just to screw with people, Forth.

Both are good and they each have their uses.

Perl is very Unix-y, recent releases have a very good object system, and Perl is quite fast but the syntax can take some getting used to. CPAN is a huge database of Perl modules, you’ll likely find what you need module wise.

Raku is amazingly flexible and I like its object and type systems more than other languages. The only only down side is compared Perl is that Raku on the slow side, even Python is faster at the moment. Raku has a much more consistent syntax than Perl but the module ecosystem is nowhere near as big.

I’d say try both and use what seems to be the most optomal for whatever task you’re dealing with. Personally, I use both for quick scripts about equally with performance and module availability usually being the deciding factors.

–

• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Perl (Scroll down to the External Links section for learning resources.)
• https://raku.guide/

This is the correct answer. Perl is shell-like with support for advanced data structures and data parsing capabilities. Modern Perl is very slick, especially with the new object system.

Out of curiosity, is a FORTRAN compiler at all self-bootsrapping in a manner akin to Forth? That is, you define a few primitives and then define the rest of the language in terms of those primitives?

Perl has entered the chat.