The Howdy Glossary

Raku, formerly known as Perl 6, is a programming language for general-purpose computer science. It was developed by Larry Wall in response to a need for more sophisticated data structures and better handling of parallelism and object-oriented programming. The language incorporates many elements from other programming languages — including Perl, Ada, C#, Haskell, Python and Ruby — with the intent of being both expressive and efficient. Raku features grammars that allow custom syntax constructs to be created without having to modify the core grammar itself. Raku’s type system supports gradual typing (where types can be specified or inferred), lazy evaluation (only performing calculations when results are requested) for improved performance in certain scenarios, as well as native access to libraries written in other languages through its Foreign Function Interface (FFI).