raku-jupyter-kernel VS raku-study

Hi u/ArcadesOfAntiquity - this is an excellent point, thank you for mentioning it. I am a very big proponent of raku on Jupyter!! I highly recommend Brian Duggan's https://github.com/bduggan/p6-jupyter-kernel and have used it to illustrate the capabilities of a couple of my modules Physics::Measure and Physics::Navigation by way of test driving this very powerful tool.

I recently came across a link to an alternate repl for Raku, and it made me realize that I've never asked folks on here about their setups for writing Raku code – there could be some great tools that I've missed. So, what all do you use? Is there anything that you love?

Oh yes, Bruce Gray was a major influence for me as well a couple of years ago. He often participates in the "Raku Study Group" meetings as well - these are very broad and informal meetings every second Sunday but around the end, Bruce almost always brings up some Raku (sometimes Perl) solutions for the weekly challenges from https://theweeklychallenge.org/. In case you are interested, the repo of the meetups: https://github.com/doomvox/raku-study

Back to the topic. I picked up Raku a couple of years ago and I mostly use it as a better shell.

The pros are that you can really quickly and swiftly deliver CLI automation tools and scripts; the language has a unique but very practical regex syntax, you have very rich tools for string manipulation and you have good utilities to "drain CPU" if you are willing to spend more resources to make something faster (e.g easy multithreading for operations). Also, the language is very pleasant to use, it makes you feel very clever and powerful.

The cons cannot be neglected, however, the biggest problem probably being the performance and stability of the only actually working compiler, Rakudo, and its most functioning bytecode VM, MoarVM. The rich string-processing system and regex engine can be surprisingly slothful if you have vast amounts of text, same for precise bigint and rational computations (which are the default). Not many people understand Rakudo (and especially the VMs) enough to work on bugs or performance improvements, and there are not many low-hanging fruit remaining. Considering this, I'm sad that there has been little strategy regarding getting new maintainers, or having a release strategy besides "we will not change anything that might break code, and just release new compiler versions every couple of months".

Also, I don't know how much this is a con for you but Raku is not a language you can just "learn", you have to explore it and always be ready for a new journey. It's a horizontally huge language with a lot of corner cases you probably cannot all keep in mind. I think I'm managing pretty well but it is definitely a risk; you should probably either find a small subset you are comfortable working with and stick to it, or be okay with exploration using whatever goes, from asking others and reading the docs to investigating the core library inside Rakudo (which is not as bad as it may sound but not everybody wants to do).