I keep wanting to get into Raku. It has such a rich pedigree of everything learned from decades of Perl, in a clean slate. It seems to suffer from lack of adoption but it seems better than *sh in every way except for ubiquity.

Indeed Raku is a delight to use for 'shell scripting'.

Perl was originally written as an amalgamation of grep,sed,tr, awk and I am sure a few more unix utilities with their own mini languages. The idea was to use one language instead of tying together half a dozen mini-languages in a shell script. And it worked really well. Perl being a demon with text munging didn't hurt.

Raku keeps this heritage but adds so much more (for better or worse :-) ). It inherits ideas from Lisp and functional programming languages. The thing that impressed me was, how easy it was to use concurrency.

It is much more complicated than Perl. Every feature you could ever want, in multiple ways, it seems like. Perl isn’t too complicated or large of a language.

I try Perl 6/Raku every few years, so it seems like I've tried it half a dozen times by now since it started. I like some things about it, but in a way it seems like an academic project, more suited for experimentation than doing work. I always come back to Perl, which has been my favorite hammer for 30 years.