Perl & Raku: Best frenemies

The Perl and Raku pro­gram­ming lan­guages have a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry togeth­er. The lat­ter was envi­sioned in the year 2000 as Perl 6, a com­plete redesign and rewrite of Perl to solve its prob­lems of dif­fi­cult main­te­nance and the bur­den of then-​13 years of back­ward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Unfortunately, the devel­op­ment effort towards a first major release dragged on for ten years, and some devel­op­ers began to believe the…