> It is absolutely mindbending to me that all of this language development has happened on top of Perl, of all things.
Why "of all things?" The Perl philosophy of TIMTOWTDI, and Wall's interest in human-language constructs and the ways that they could influence programming-language constructs, seem to make its successor an obvious home for experiments like this.
It has the same whimsy and DWIM of perl, look at Promise having a status of 'kept' or 'broken' which is more fun than 'fulfilled' or 'rejected'. Brings to mind Perl 5's use of bless, calling the filter function 'grep' and local/global variables created with 'my' and 'our'.
Yes, though perl5 is also an incredibly bendable language syntax wise - you can add keywords and operators to the compiler via CPAN modules (our async/await syntax is provided simply by doing 'use Future::AsyncAwait' for example).
Why "of all things?" The Perl philosophy of TIMTOWTDI, and Wall's interest in human-language constructs and the ways that they could influence programming-language constructs, seem to make its successor an obvious home for experiments like this.