2019.14 Challenge Taking Off

The Perl Weekly Challenge has generated quite a few submissions and associated blog posts (and of course the repository with submitted solutions). There’s now also a recap of the first challenge by Mohammad S Anwar. Keeping track of all the blog posts has become quite a job. Hopefully yours truly didn’t miss any in this overview:

• Perl Weekly Challenge #1: translate letters and count. by JJ Merelo.
• Perl Weekly Challenge, First Week by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl 6 small stuff #16: All your base are belong to us by Jo Christian Oterhals (Twitter comments).
• Perl Weekly Challenge, Week 2 by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl 6 from Zero to 35 by Arne Sommer.
• Too late to submit by ogniloud.

Check out the guide for submissions if you’re thinking about adding your own Perl 6 solutions.

A Language Creators’ Conversation

Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Larry Wall & Anders Hejlsberg sat together at the latest PuPPy meeting in Seattle and discussed language creation. Sadly, the audio of the video is very bad. Regardless of that, it spurred quite a discussion on Hacker News. Good to see Larry up and about!

Looking for Grant Committee Members

The TPF Grant Committee is looking for new members. Being a member involves needing to read any official grant proposals (which you might be reading already anyway), and submitting a vote once every 2 months or so, possibly after some mailing list discussion. (Facebook comments).

YACM

Or, welcome Patrick Böker, our latest Yet Another Core Member on the Rakudo Perl 6 project. Patrick was recently involved in making the build of Rakudo Perl 6 completely relocatable, which is very much welcomed by various packagers of Rakudo Perl 6. Looking forward to see much more of this good work!

Aearnus looking at Perl 6

A student at the University of Arizona for mathematics and theatre has written two blog posts about Perl 6 in the past week, which both created quite a stir.

The first one titled “A Whirlwind Tour of Perl 6’s Best Features” starts with:

It’s rare that I find a language that I truly feel innovates upon established conventions and features.

(Reddit comments). This blog post also started a large discussion on /r/programming titled Maybe it’s finally time to give Perl 6 a shot.

The second blog post was titled “Perl 6 is the World’s Worst ML (with addendum by Damian Conway)” (ML on Wikipedia), with quite a few comments on /r/perl6 and Hacker News.

Nice to see two such positive blog posts coming from an unexpected source!

Javascript backend update

Paweł Murias reports on the progress of the work on the Javascript backend of Rakudo Perl 6. Precompilation is still an issue. And a bug found in Chrome. And future plans! Kudos again to Paweł Murias for all this hard work. So good to see it coming to fruition!

Practical Perl 6 Regexes

Brian Duggan has published the slides of his presentation about Practical Perl 6 Regexes given at the DC Baltimore Perl Workshop last weekend.

Perl 6 not so full of art

A blog post showing that 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs completely disregarded the fact that with use strict (which has been recommended to be used always for at least past 25 years) this number would be closer to zero. Ah well, some people get stuck in the “then they laugh at you” phase (Hacker News comments with some Perl 6 references).

Swiss Perl Workshop CFP

About a week after the European Perl Conference, there will be the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 in Olten on 16 and 17 August. The Call for Papers has been opened. Please submit your Perl 6 presentations for what looks it’s going to be another nice and cosy Swiss Perl Workshop!

Core developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed various memory leaks that occurred with certain types of long running programs and certain combinations of asynchronous and parallelizing features. He also made the inline limit settable per language, allowing for a smaller limit for NQP. This appears to make building and testing of Rakudo Perl 6 about 5% faster.
• Patrick Böker fixed a build issue on Windows. And he also made sure that Rakudo will build and install on operating systems that do not have a bash installed by default.
• Tom Browder improved the README.md to include notes about testing.
• Ben Davies fixed handling of some edge-cases of parameters to ThreadPoolScheduler.cue.
• Wenjie Sun fixed a problem with deprecation message of the handling of the RAKUDO_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable.
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Default definition of white space method ws in a grammar by Håkon Hægland.
• ACCEPTS vs smartmatch in Hashes: what’s the difference? by JJ Merelo.
• Are our variables dynamic? by drclaw.
• Where is contains(Junction) defined? by JJ Merelo.
• How to pass hash-like object which does associative role to a constructor expecting a hash? by Håkon Hægland.
• Avoid creating temporary scalars when returning multiple arrays by Håkon Hægland.
• Matching non-whitespace characters by Ben Davies.
• What happens when a declarator (my/state) is in a loop block? by drclaw.
• A difference between UTF-8 and Texas operators by Fernando Santagata.
• How to use Grammar::Tracer with a unit scoped grammar? by Håkon Hægland.
• Does ratcheting affect nesting structures and “frugal quantifiers”? by Fernando Santagata.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Happy Todd by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• MacOS Mojave 10.14.4, Rakudo Star 2019.03.1, zef install Ddt ->Failed to change the working directory… by David Christensen.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• ORM Answer by The Perl Shop.
• Rakudo Star Released by Евгения Домерникова.
• Try to get my head around it by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Cool bleeding edge by The Perl Shop.
• Need a few 20 min talks by Andrew Shitov.
• … 6 by Martin A. Brooks.
• PHP Parser by PHP OSS.
• A little understanding by 花月かすみΛ__Λ.
• A nice review by JJ Merelo.
• Jokingly, more difficult by Николай Говоров.
• Last minute save by PuPPy.
• Best balance? by Larry Hastings.
• What prevents evolving? by Loooorena Mesa @ The Cosmos 💫 💫.
• 1400+ pages of Perl 6 Documentation by JJ Merelo.
• So many neat things by Brendan Zabarauskas.
• Let’s fully understand by watiko.
• Shipped, with types by theory b respecter.
• Complete rewrite of regex syntax by firebreathingduck.
• Looked at Inline::Go? by Brad Gilbert.
• Different & amazing by BrendanEich.
• Still stays Perl by Aleksa.
• Added support for 5 languages by Alexey Melezhik.
• It works by こばやし ‘にらたま’ けんいち.
• Looks like Perl by Chason Chaffin.
• Quine by Ilmari.
• Not a timely version by Perlゼミ.
• Did you know? by masasuzu.
• Extensible grammar by Olivier Mengué.
• I remember by a dog with bad opinions.
• Don’t discount Perl 6 by Mick Watson.
• Paint splatters by jeeger.
• Sorry for what’s coming by a dog with bad opinions.
• Surprising results by JJ Merelo.
• A great intro by mempko.
• But the best by Moritz Lenz.
• Bad default? by Joelle Maslak.
• Love multi-dispatch MAIN by Joelle Maslak.
• Not the answer by Jeremy Kahn.
• Grammar Answer by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Dramatic pause by Interferencias.
• Best features by Michael Kohl.
• Doesn’t meet by %20｜1751 (-70).
• Not a big difference by JJ Merelo.
• Reminded by JUAGλ.
• Not necessary by via900.
• 8 Bytes by Anagolfer.
• Challenging task by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Stay for Perl 6 by Simon Proctor.
• Hating Perl 6 by Karl D. Asmussen.
• An opportunity by Herbert Breunung.
• Please check status of PerlCon talks by Andrew Shitov.
• Exercism by たかのあきこ@freeCodeCamp攻略中.
• Size matters by Perl Conferences.
• From Perl 5? by たかのあきこ@freeCodeCamp攻略中.
• Interested in Perl 6 by Antonio.
• Or two. Or three by JJ Merelo.
• Thinking about using Perl 6 by 八雲アナグラ.
• Solution Distribution by Mohammad S Anwar.

Perl 6 in comments

• Definitely not Perl 6 by algoritm420.
• Decline before the debacle by simias.
• Some points of note by b2gills.
• Reactive programming in Javascript, inspired by Supply by marcoonroad.
• Not always a reference implementation by pushpop.
• Not its cause by cygx.
• Endorsing string types? by tyingq.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Algorithm::HierarchicalPAM by Itsuki Toyota.
• Acme::Polyglot::Levenshtein::Damerau by Nick Logan.
• Intl::CLDR by Matthew ‘Matéu’ Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Text::LDIF by Sylwester Lunski.

Updated modules:

• Acme::Cow by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Term::Choose, Term::Form, Term::TablePrint, Term::Choose::Util by Matthäus Kiem.
• FindBin by Steven Lembark.
• NativeHelpers::Callback, LibUUID by Curt Tilmes.
• Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.
• LogP6 by Mikhail Khorkov.

Winding Down

An exciting week with many submissions, blog posts and quite a few positive comments and support from unexpected corners of the interwebs. Tis looking a lot like spring! Please check in again next week for more news about Perl 6!