Originally published on 17 May 2009 by Carl Mäsak.
On a whim, I walked barefoot almost all day today. I even went out for a long walk, more than two hours. The weather was beautiful, lots of sun and no wind. I walked on different kinds of asphalt, on dirt roads, on grass, on the kinds of roads made entirely from small sharp pebbles, on rock, and on the floor of my grocery store. All the while, I kept thinking, this is like Raku.
Programming in Raku is like walking barefoot. Being in the Raku community is like walking barefoot, too.
Analogies are by nature flawed, because if they weren’t partly untrue they would be identities or equivalences instead. But I find some degree of truth in the comparison. It smartmatches on my .ACCEPT method.
- We’re programming without libraries. It’s temporary, because we expect to connect back to the CPAN goodness eventually. But right now, all the invented wheels already on CPAN, are inaccessible to us, all the protective footwear already pushed for the benefit of Perl programmers everywhere is un-pullable by us. We’re on foot, without shoes, feeling every little sharp pebble in the road.
- This, I might add, limits the distance you can cover in one programming session. I’ve started planning my Raku sessions with this in mind. You don’t set out on foot from Stockholm expecting to reach Gothenburg on the same day.
- Oh, and the community is crossing the river by feeling each stone on many levels: we’re evolving the spec, the test suite, the implementations, the libraries, all the while checking where we are and where we’re going. It’s a wonderful process, and I sometimes think we, the community, are really good at it considering that all things are interdependent and in constant flux. We’re getting there, one stone at a time.
- Finally, the community is small and consists of a lot of nice people. We don’t have our shields up on #raku, instead we tend to trust each other, assuming benevolence and taking our time to explain things to newcomers. Our humor is quirky and intellectual, full of a mix of quantum physics, lolcats, and whatever pun on the Raku syntax is fashionable that day. It’s really a warm channel, well worth a visit. When you go visit there, try to imagine everyone in there sitting on a patch of grass, barefoot, talking about the future of Raku.