2017.10 ≤ It’s all relative ≥

In the past week, we saw the landing of several Unicode operators in Rakudo Perl 6: ≤ (aka <=), ≥ (aka >=), ≠ (aka !=) and finally ⁇ ‼ (aka ?? !!), courtesy of Fernando Correa de Oliveira and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev. This was tweeted by Zoffix and had quite a few (weird) responses. Well, weird for those of us not versed in Twitter Etiquette: Priorities, Relevant, APL, Mad (Irish) and Duct Tape. That was another 5 minutes of fame in our Twitterverse. Now at 220+ followers, a 10% increase in 2 weeks!

On The Book Front

The cover contest for Moritz Lenz‘s Perl 6 By Example book has a winner. Congratulations! My personal favourite, with the origami / paper ripping effect, so yours truly is happy as well.

Meanwhile, Andrew Shitov has officially announced his new Perl 6 book: Migrating To Perl 6. Which incidentally also has an origami inspired cover. Expected in paperback in May 2017.

There also was a thread on Reddit about Perl books, “incited” by the coming “barrage” of Perl 6 books. 🙂

Core Developments

• A potentially breaking change was implemented by Elizabeth Mattijsen. The .reverse method now returns a Seq instead of a List. This makes reversing shorter Lists faster, but more importantly, it prevents unnecessary copying by using an iterator that walks a reified list from the end to the beginning (rather than iterating over a reversed copy from beginning to end). Code expecting .reverse to return a List rather than something more generally Iterable may break. So far, no reports of such breakage are known.
• Jonathan Worthington worked on fixing many issues again the past week. One of them involved translation of newlines on Windows (which is now on by default with Proc::Async).
• Zoffix Znet made sure that a Seq and a List can never be considered the same with eqv. He also implemented Str.parse-names, which gives functionality similar to "\c[BELL, BLACK HEART SUIT]", except it can be used at runtime, without requiring EVAL or the use of nqp ops.
• Samantha McVey fixed several issues with the unicode support, specifically on the JVM.
• On the speedup department: callframe about 20% faster, reduce on operators with right associativity now about 30% to 2x faster, IO::Handle.lines about 20% faster.
• And of course many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

• A Unicode Search Tool by Moritz Lenz.
• Health Kit Data by Michael.
• Using (Python) matplotlib in Perl 6: Intro, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 by 0racle (Reddit comments).
• Wikipedia Revealed True Identity of Perl. The worst definition of Perl by marcm28.
• A collection of consul health checks for some well known applications by Alexey Melezhik.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• 10 times by Zoffix Znet.
• ZofBot Relaying by Zoffix Znet.
• Where ZofBot lives by Zoffix Znet.
• :D/:U type smileys by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Does changing Perl 6’s $*OUT change standard output for child processes? by brian d foy.
• Negating multiple words and permutations of their chars inside a regex by lisprogtor.

Ecosystem Additions

Quite a nice catch this week!

• SSH::LibSSH by Jonathan Worthington.
• Context by Brad Clawsie.
• EventSource::Server by Jonathan Stowe.
• XML::Rabbit by Martin Barth.
• Git::Simple by Jarkko Haapalainen.
• Pg::Notify by Jonathan Stowe.
• Powerline::Prompt by Jarkko Haapalainen.
• Text::More by Tom Browder.
• Spit by Lloyd Fournier.

Winding Down

Spring is in the air! And so is rain. With some sunshine in between. And that about sums it up for the past week. See you next week for more Perl 6 news.