2018.17 Docking Tau Station

Curtis “Ovid” Poe has opened Tau Station, a whole new take on Science Fiction MMOS, with a simple blog post (Reddit comments). A massive project that has been in development for many years, is now open for your pleasure!

For those who love to read, love to play, and love science, Tau Station offers a unique narrative experience which evolves with your choices. But be warned, in a post-Catastrophe galaxy where most people are just struggling to survive, there isn’t always a clear way forward or a happy ending to be found.

With a backend written in Modern Perl 5 from scratch.

So why mention this in the Perl 6 Weekly? Because it shows that Perl as a mindset is very much alive. And that we already have a Perl 6 module for converting between TauStation’s GCT and Old Earth Time. Who knows what the future will bring in interfacing with Perl 6 and Perl 5 in general, and Tau Station in particular?

RFC for Quality Assurance of Perl 6 Modules

Patrick Spek is looking for feedback on improving Dist::Helper by adding a Quality Assurance functionality. If you have any ideas about this issue, then please let them be known as comments to the issue!

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with alignment of memory blocks in the nursery on picky architectures, after Robert Lemmen had found the issue.
• Samantha McVey optimised the decoding of ShiftJIS.
• Jonathan Worthington avoided a problem in subset constraints that was a regression.
• And many smaller fixes, updates and improvements in preparation for the next Rakudo compiler release.

Blog Posts

• Viability of unpopular programming languages by John D Cook (Hacker News comments).
• My passion is for Perl 5 programming language by castlecorbenic888.
• German Perl Workshop by Makoto Nozaki.

Videos

• Perl 6 on Jupyter (FOSDEM 2018, Reddit comments) by Brian Duggan.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Webapp for Perl 6 Marketing materials by Zoffix Znet.
• Readable Regexes? by Zoffix Znet.
• Two days later by Zoffix Znet.
• From pts2018 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Single Page Perl; 6 Documentation by JJ Merelo.
• Great Unicode support by Patrick Spek.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to return a value from a block’s CATCH phaser? by J Hall.
• Succinct way to change thrown Exception to Failure? by J Hall.
• Appending multiple values to an array by Martin Barth.
• When is <|w> word boundary not a << word boundary? by brian d foy.
• What’s an “additional tie breaker” for longest token matching? by brian d foy.
• How can I interact with the Github API? by jsaigle.
• String interpolation by Ozzy.
• Method returning a Regex by Eugene Barsky.
• Using public and private methods inside their class by Eugene Barsky.
• chdir error by branco.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Blob – what am I missing? by Fernando Santagata.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

With now more than 500 members in the Perl 6 Group!

• Great glue language by Al Schimke.

Perl 6 in comments

• Gradual Typing by Patrick Spek.
• Perl 6 is watching you by Ultimatt.
• Inline::Perl5 automatically maps Perl 5’s syntax by raiph.
• Memories of Parrot by Steltek.
• “New” Perl 6 Projects by raiph.
• Direct competition by gaius.
• It’s a beautiful language by tribby.
• Demise? by hpcjoe.
• Delays for decades by wincent.
• Insufficiently flexible? by raiph.
• High Risk by throwawayjava.
• Both are being actively developed by b2gills.
• Very few features removed by b2gills.
• They always belonged together by b2gills.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules (some of which I missed the previous weeks):

• Data::StaticTable by shinobi.
• Java::Generate by Altai-man.
• App::OrgSleep by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev.
• CUID by Marco Aurélio da Silva.
• Koos by Tony O’Dell.
• Test::Time by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Slang::AltTernary by Martin Ryan.
• Bailador::Plugin::NamedQueries by Mario Zieschang.
• Lingua::Stem::Es by Christian Sánchez.
• Games::TauStation::DateTime by Zoffix Znet.
• List::SomeUtils by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• List::UtilsBy by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• List::AllUtils by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• App::Assixt by Patrick Spek.
• Distribution::Builder::MakeFromJSON by Stefan Seifert.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Ops::SI by Patrick Spek.
• App::FindSource by araraloren.

By the way, if you want to keep up to date on Perl 6 module uploads to CPAN, you can follow @perl6_cpan_new on Twitter, thanks to Shoichi Kaji.

Winding Down

After another week in which yours truly was on an emotional rollercoaster, it’s good to see that Perl 6 is getting out there more and more. Check in again next week for updates on all the things that have been happening, in the foreground and in the background!