2017.52 When it is no more

Leon Timmerman notified the community about upcoming changes in Pumpking Perl 5 with regards to the removal of when (blogs.perl.org, reddit, Hacker News comments). brian d foy reacted with a blog post of his own (Reddit comments).

Looking at these events (sort of) from the outside, yours truly can’t help but think that Pumpking Perl 5 is about to make a mistake similar to one that Rakudo Perl 6 has made: breaking compatibility. But without the advantages that Rakudo Perl 6 brings now. In other words: the proposed changes to Pumpking Perl 5 will only turn people away from Perl, rather than pulling in new users. Yours truly feels that would be detrimental to all languages in the Perl family. And that it is always better to make new mistakes.

Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars

Nikos Vaggalis extensively reviewed Moritz Lenz‘s excellent Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars book. Some quotes from the review:

You can easily infer that Mortiz is the definitive authority to talk to about the subject, and this book is his attempt to impart this knowledge accumulated throughout the years

Perl 6 is a magnificent language whose depth is only starting to emerge and the more you look the more you find something new

So get it, read it, get it and use it! 🙂

White Camel Awards 2017

brian d foy has announced the White Camel Award winners of 2017 (blogs.perl.org comments). Yours truly would hereby like to congratulate Laurent Boivin, Rob Masic and Kurt Demaagd on behalf of the Perl 6 Weekly readers!

Rebirth of Perl.com

Jim Brandt and David Farrell describe how Perl.com came to be and how it will evolve again in the future. Kudos to both, hoping to see good new content there in the not too distant future!

The Last of Adventing

• Language Independent Validation Rules (LIVR) by Viktor Turskyi (Reddit comments).
• Advancements in Macrotechnologies by vendethiel.
• Sudoku with Junctions and Sets by Simon Proctor.
• Features of Perl 6.d by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• The Wonders of Perl 6 Golf by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev (Reddit comments).
• Solving a Rubik’s Cube by Will Coleda.
• Concurrent HTTP Server implementation and the scripter’s approach by Ramiro Encinas.

Compiler Release 2017.12

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev released yet another Rakudo Compiler Release, in close coordination with Samantha McVey and Zoffix Znet.

Other Core Developments

• Zoffix Znet was very busy again this week. He fixed an issue with zeroing out elements of Buf and native arrays. He also fixed a problem with IO::CatHandle switching handles too early. And fixed various issues with the slightly changed semantics of the bool-only and count-only Iterator optimization. And he introduced uniparse as the 6.d equivalent of parse-names.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced a new .WHICH type: ValueObjAt. If an object has a .WHICH of this type, it indicates that the object is a value type. Which means that different objects with the same value should be considered interchangeable. She also made sure that lists are considered value types if they consist of value types only. This makes List more DWIM in the light of things likes Set, object hashes and .unique.
• Ben Davies made sure that Configure.pl uses gmake on BSD‘s.
• Timo Paulssen made sure that is-prime is JITted.
• And many other smaller fixes and error message improvements.

Other Blog Posts

• 30 Things about Perl on its 30th Birthday by Evozon (Reddit comments).

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Looking for a Challenge? by Zoffix Znet.
• Matching things with Perl 6 grammars by JJ Merelo.
• Settling the Naming debate by Zoffix Znet.
• Happy 2nd Birthday! by Zoffix Znet.
• Vetting 6.d by Zoffix Znet.
• On the importance of commit messages by Zoffix Znet.
• Is not so good by Zoffix Znet.
• Introducing Testo by Zoffix Znet.
• Loads of Fun by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Retrieving data from a hash with array values by Eugene Barsky.
• One-liner to print unique lines of a file by Eugene Barsky.
• Picking a pair of coordinates by Mikkel.
• How to check that all elements of an array are defined? by Eugene Barsky.
• Using a hash with object keys by Eugene Barsky.
• How to check new for invalid arguments? by sid_com.
• Is there some difference between .is-prime and is-prime()? by Eugene Barsky.

Winding Down

Writing the Perl 6 Weekly on Christmas Day is a bit weird. Yours truly hopes that everybody enjoys their days off (if any) and hopes this will only be read a few days from now. And also hopes to see you all again in the New Year with many more Perl 6 goodies to report on!