Raku: Why It Hasn't Caught On
I've been watching Raku since it was still Perl 6, back when Larry Wall gave his State of the Onion talk in 2000. Fifteen years from announcement to 1.0. You can defend the timeline; they were rebuilding the language from the ground up, grammars, gradual typing, a real MOP, the whole catalog, and the result is something I genuinely enjoy writing. But anyone who pretends the wait didn't have a cost is just wrong. Pugs gave us something runnable in 2005, Rakudo Star landed in 2010 but with a real 1.0 release not shipping until Christmas 2015. By then many of the developers who would have championed it had moved on. Python, for example, had already eaten the scripting world alive. The window where anyone outside the Perl tent was paying attention closed somewhere around 2008, and nobody really noticed.