...why would you prefer to reach for the "no true scotsman ...", rather than read in any one of two other places in this thread that you are dealing with fellow scotsmen here?

I can't debate Raku with you, because I don't know any Raku, because, why should I? Life is short. I do know Perl 5, and the only context where a discussion of Raku even makes sense is as an upgrade path for Perl 5. Upgrade path doesn't mean that a program written in Perl 5 should run with unaltered syntax and semantics in Raku and not panic. Providing an upgrade path for Python 2 was one of the primary purposes of Python 3, and they didn't understand it that way either. Upgrade path simply means: Leverage syntax and semantics and mental models already in programmers' minds and change them where necessary to trade off short term pain for long term gain. (But it's less pain than learning a different language altogether with completely different syntax and semantics and mental models).

I can give you a list of grievances I have with Perl 5. Maybe Raku addresses some of those. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know, but also, it doesn't matter. The late arrival of Raku means decades' worth of people using Python and other languages as an upgrade path for Perl 5 instead, so Raku addressing any of those grievances is now closing the barn doors after the horse has bolted. Any Perl 5 codebases still out there are run by people who are so allergic to the idea of having to touch their code, that Raku isn't an option for those folks either.

Having said all of that: Some of my grievances with Perl 5:

* No separate types of bytestrings versus sequences of unicode codepoints. Wherever there's strings in any non-trivially-sized real-word Perl 5 project, there is utter irreversible and irredeemable mojibake. This includes databases backing Perl applications, where they themselves don't have enforcement, so even if you threw away all of your code and started from scratch and just wanted to keep your data, Perl 5 would still haunt you from its grave. -- Having strings not be mojibake is easy as hell in 2026. Perl 5 makes this easy thing impossible, so I really don't share your idea of "make easy things easy"

* No canonical way to do object-orientation. (cf. blessed objects, Moo in different versions, and different conventions around how to use them) -- This stuff should be easy in 2026. Perl makes this easy thing really hard.

* Regexes suck. Their brevity is a nice circus stunt for a computer science audience, but unless you follow very particular patterns for composing them from ergonomically named constants, etc. etc. (which "in the wild" I rarely see), they are very unergonomic.

* Perl one-liners, and RSA decryption written in the form of a camel, make for nice t-shirts, but the same argument as above applies to them. There is no purpose today (but probably never was) in one-linerism because an LLM will knock out 10 lines of Python just as fast as 1 line of Perl, and reading those 10 lines of Python (which is the part that actually still matters) is more ergonomic than reading the Perl one-liner.

* The Perl 5/CPAN ecosystem has been left to rot and is no longer safe for consumption.

The goal of a general purpose programming language is to communicate a program from one human to another, and from one human today to the same human tomorrow, while understanding that a program is only written once, but read many times. -- In that goal it is no different from a natural language. -- This goal needs to be optimized for within the constraint that programs must also compile and execute in the way and with the outcomes that a human reading the code would expect.

Your observation about Brainfuck makes my point for me: If the execution was the actual goal, then Brainfuck would be as good a programming language as Rust, Zig, or Nim; but that clearly isn't the case.

I am one of those, and I disagree with the moral connotation of that framing.

When you're in the know and give advice to someone who isn't, or when you're the previous generation passing on your lessons learned to the next, then you have two paths. You can either be honest about things that don't/didn't work, so mistakes won't be repeated. Or you can make it seem as if pixie dust covers everything you have expertise in that others don't and everything that your generation did that the next one will never know, so you look good. -- I don't think that the former path is the more morally reprehensible one at all. "Bad mouthing" is the wrong analogy here.

For a random complaint of mine (one of many) see [1]. Using Perl as my main programming language for 3.5 years has given me plenty of "meat" to throw around; I just don't want to bore people with it, nor do I want to re-live the trauma.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42460014

EDIT: ...just realized that's in the FAQ.

> Is it open source?

> Not yet. Maybe someday.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897772

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.

The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.

As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.

...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.

The quote is usually delivered as a punchline of sorts, but we're rapidly approaching a world where there truly will be only five computers. If you define a computer as a system capable of truly general purpose computing, and if you count the computers as systems each capable of operating truly independently of the others. The term "general purpose" needs the further qualification, that a great deal of power and political capital will be needed to have any say in what purpose one of these five computers will be put to, and it will then be forced on the other people who are forced to work with that computer.

Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!

I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.

Then, when they give me the take-home, I would ask how many other people are in the stage with me. If it's 20, with only one candidate getting hired, forget it. My expectation in such situations would be that they won't be able to trim the pipeline as much as they will need/want to by applying purely objective/rational criteria, and I'd end up getting rejected on grounds of "inability to mind-read subjective preferences".

Immutable distros just one-up that by trying to steer the system in a direction where it can work with a readonly rootfs in normal operation, and nudging you to take a snapshot before/after taking the rootfs from readonly to read-write. (openSUSE has you covered there as well, if that's your thing; it's called MicroOS).

Both of those distros use KDE by default, so the value-add of KDE having its own distribution is basically so they can have a "reference implementation" that will always have all the latest and greatest that KDE has to offer, and showcase to the rest of the Linux world, how they envision the integration should be done.

If I were to set up a library computer or a computer for my aging parents, I would choose openSUSE Leap Micro with KDE, as that would put the emphasis on stability instead.

The problem IMO is politics, not nationalism (which only enters into the politics indirectly). European integration is a half-done project. Political forces that want to finish the job get cancelled out by political forces that want to undo the progress we've already made with the net effect of nothing getting done in any direction, maintaining a status-quo that pretty much nobody wants, and nobody (nationalist or otherwise) ever wanted. And that status quo is that doing business in a pan-european way is a bureaucratic hellscape.

https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#a-foolish-consistency-is-t...

I wonder how a code formatting tool is going to implement that.