[TristanBall]

Regex's predate perl quite substantially. Think grep and friends if nothing else.

Certainly making the perlre library available separate to perl encouraged its widespread use, and lots of others copied or were inspired by it.

"Popularized" doesn't seem like quite the right word though, I don't disagree with the point, but if I shout "Hey everyone let's write regex's" at the office people throw stationary at me, which is not true of other popular things!

[wlonkly]

Perl spread regexes.

[emporas]

Super spreader event we've got ourselves into.

I took a look at Raku, which claims be a better Perl maybe, or closely related but more modern, it certainly looks nice. Although i am a big fan of typed languages, Raku piqued my interest.

[lizmat]

In Raku, if you want to go typed, you can! It's called "gradually typed".

my Int $a = 42; # ok

my Int $a = "foo"; # Type check failed in assignment to $a; expected Int but got Str ("foo")

[emporas]

Very nice, good to know. Yes i know gradual typing, Python has a form of that i think. I will check out Raku at some point, the type system will not go unnoticed. I didn't even know it had one!