2018.52 Three Years Later

It was only 3 years ago that the first official release of Perl 6 saw the light of day. Today, we are 36 compiler releases on, with the latest one, the 2018.12 release coming out a few days ago. Again done by Samantha McVey and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, with Claudio Ramirez again taking immediate care of the Linux packages. It all seems so normal. And that’s a good thing! Although some applause is always appreciated!

Prepare Your Presentations!

Both the German Perl Workshop (6-8 March 2019) and the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop (6 April 2019) have announced their Call For Presentations. The CFP for the German Perl Workshop ends on 20 January, and the CFP for the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop ends on 31 January. What better time to contemplate your Perl 6 Presentations for 2019 than the Holiday Season? Or even better, prepare them?

Tomtit!

Alexey Melezhik has written two blog posts about his latest product Tomtit: One Tomtit to make it and Automation of Perl 6 development workflow through the Tomtit task runner. A great new alternative to source code management and build automation! (Reddit comments).

Manage PostgreSQL Version (strings)

Luca Ferrari has written a nice blog post about a Perl 6 class to manage PostgreSQL Version strings in a Perl 6 program. A nice example of a small utility class. Too bad it isn’t in the ecosystem or on CPAN yet 😦

A new tool for language compilers

Andrew Shitov has had his presentation using grammars to design and implement a programming language accepted in the Minimalistic Languages track at the next FOSDEM (2/3 february 2019). Congratulations! (/r/perl6, /r/ProgrammingLanguages comments).

Tis the Time of Year

The final set of general Advent Posts:

• An SVG Christmas Tree by Jonathan Stowe (Reddit comments).
• Interactive Desktop Apps by Simon Proctor (Facebook comments).
• Propositional combinatorics by tobs (Reddit comments).
• A Red Secret Santa by Fernando Correa de Oliveira (Reddit comments).
• Testing Cro HTTP APIs by Jonathan Worthington.
• Blin, it’s Christmas soon! by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev.
• Topic Modeling with Algorithhm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota.

And the one-line Advent Posts by Andrew Shitov:

• Renaming Files
• Using map and Seq to compute the value of π
• Using command-line options in one-liners
• Merging files horizontally (Reddit comments)
• Reversing a file (Reddit comments)
• Calculating totals
• Reading files with $*ARGFILES

If you’re more fluent in Chinese, you can also read all of Andrew Shitov‘s one-liner Advent Posts in Chinese, thanks to 0条评论 (Reddit comments).

Questions about Perl 6

• When does BEGIN actually start (or is run)? by JJ Merelo.
• NativeCall cannot locate symbol in native library by ryn1x.
• General approach to modifying an array while looping through it by lisprogtor.
• “Too few positionals” in macro definition by JJ Merelo.
• Performant math operations on large CArrays? by ryn1x.
• Iterate over string (UAX #29) by Lars Dieckow.
• Most mindblowing aspects of Perl 6? by Alex Woehr.
• Macros do not allow definition of lexical variables by JJ Merelo.
• Why is the REPL not distinguishing between two different classes? by jmcneirney.
• Is it possible to use TT2 with Cro? by p6steve.
• How to do I keep a module’s pod at the bottom of a file while still using declarator blocks to document method/subs? by uzixxx.
• EXPORTHOW::DECLARE and role-like declaration by Vadim Belman.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A Mysterious Butterfly by まえけん.
• More nice by ryn1x.
• Bumped by Simon Proctor.
• Become a Minister by magnoliak.
• An idea by Simon Proctor.
• In Perl 6 by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Where have I heard that before? by Bernie Simon.
• Minor or equal by JJ Merelo.
• NativeCall on Windows by ryn1x.
• Your favourite language by ryn1x.
• A bit old by Lyndon Maydwell.
• Viable option for imaging by ryn1x.
• Perl 6 released? by Giuseppe Paleologo.
• Clever Language by Marc Chantreux.
• Better type systems by h100gfld.
• Committed Community by JJ Merelo.
• Entirely doable by Jonathan Stowe.
• Better and better by chenyf.
• Hacked a script by monnnef.
• Bumped to 2018.12 by Lance Wicks.
• Treated respectfully by Joelle Maslak.
• A Party by Steve Scaffidi.
• You know what! by Alvaro Videla.
• Template System? by Joelle Maslak.
• An unexpected first by Claudio Ramirez.
• Database part in Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Sneezing on the screen by Fake “Unicode.”.
• Perl 6 in browser by dotHTML5.
• On debian testing by Marc Chantreux.
• code-golf.io by Lance Wicks.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Faltplan Perl by Wendy van Dijk.
• Built on Raspberry Pi Zero W’s by Robert Eaglestone.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Contains booboo by ToddAndMargo.
• Exactly what is type match? by ToddAndMargo.
• so as a method: Is this expected or a bug? by Richard Hainsworth.
• Tricks: class cloning by Vadim Belman.
• say Cool-concat-junction question by yary.

Perl 6 in comments

• No length by b2gills.
• Threw everything out by fiddlerwoaroof.
• Stole the term “gradual typing” by Ralph Mellor.
• Crazytown by IvyMike.
• No True Scotsman? by tomp.
• Incredible power by hpcjoe.
• Go crazy by a-dub.
• Mind-expandin radical design by daotoad.
• Grammars in grammars by Ralph Mellor.
• Expect a better migration path by sbinet.
• Another translation by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Looking more and more like Perl 6 by MR4D.
• Feature I like by mclehman.
• A Perl 6 version by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• X11::libxdo by Steve Schulze.
• Graphics::TinyTIFF by ryn1x.

Update modules:

• HTTP::Request::Supply by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Pod::Load by JJ Merelo.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• IO::Socket::Async::SSL by Jonathan Worthington.
• PDF::Class, PDF::ISO_32000 by David Warring.
• IoC by Martin Barth.
• Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik.
• Algorithm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota.
• Uzu by Sam Morrison.

Winding Down

Since not a lot has happened in the past week apart from the work done on getting the 2018.12 Rakudo compiler release out of the door, yours truly will keep the other core developments for the next Perl 6 Weekly, scheduled next Sunday. See you then!