2019.22 When steroids are a given

Matthew ‘Matéu’ Stephen Stuckwisch has written a very nice blog post about the magic that given and when can bring to the readability of your code. It got quite some feedback! Even though smart-matching has been a thing in the Perl world for quite some time, the concept of smart-matching seemed to startle many people. See discussions on Hacker News, /r/perl6, /r/ProgrammingLanguages, Facebook and Twitter: Simon Proctor, Jonathan Stowe, Ted Davis, Amjad Masad, The Perl Shop.

German Perl Workshop Videos

The videos of the German Perl Workshop have been uploaded. People interested in Perl 6 presentations, should look at:

• Escape analysis and related optimizations for Perl 6 by Jonathan Worthington.
• Understanding react, supply, and whenever by Jonathan Worthington.
• Creating a compiler in Perl 6 by Andrew Shitov.
• Perl 6 one-liners by Andrew Shitov.
• Und goto ist so nützlich by Herbert Breunung (German).
• Run Perl in the Browser with WebPerl! by Hauke Dämpfling.
• Parsen mit Zuversicht by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ (German).
• The Perl 6 Weekly by Elizabeth Mattijsen (Germanish).

French Perl Workshop

In only a few weeks, there will be another French Perl Workshop with the motto “Perl Workshop — Act XV: three languages, three communities, one hackfest, one conference”. Strasbourg is a very nice city, with nice people and a nice venue, so yours truly is very tempted to attend.

pyx

Ralph Mellor started an interesting thought experiment to encourage real newbies to programming to try exploration of a language with a simplified Perl 6 syntax, which caused quite a discussion (and a name change from the originally suggested pyrl). Intriguing 🙂

Concurrent evolution

JJ Merelo reported on his poster about concurrent evolutionary algorithms in Perl 6, presented last April in Leipzig.

More cryptography

Arne Sommer continued his series of blog posts on DIY Cryptography with Perl 6 with Part 5: Real Text. Again, worth reading!

Azure Automation

Alexey Melehzik describes how you can automate the interaction with the Azure KeyVault using Sparrow6.

Grant proposals!

Another call for grant proposals has been made by The Perl Foundation. Please submit your ideas to make Perl 6 better!

Quick Syntax Reference

A new Perl 6 book was announced: Perl 6 Quick Syntax Reference by JJ Merelo. Too bad we will have to wait until November 11 before we can really get it 😦 (Facebook comments).

Starting with the GSOC

Madeleine Goebel describes what she did to come up to steam for her part in the Google Summer of Code in a blog post titled: “Getting Started: Developing for Perl 6“. It provides some very useful links to anybody wanting to get into helping out with Rakudo Perl 6 internals. Looking good so far!

Whatever whenever does

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer went a little deeper still into the inner workings of whenever in Whatever whenever does, inspired by Jonathan Worthington‘s answer to “Is whenever signal() in react block order dependent?“.

Perl Weekly Challenge

Blog posts in Perl 6 for the Perl Weekly Challenge #10:

• Roman Numerals in Perl 6 by Donald Hunter (Reddit comments).
• Perl Weekly Challenge # 10: Roman Numerals and the Jaro-Winkler Distance by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Fun with Perl 6 using Roman Numerals by Daniel Mita (Reddit, Facebook comments).
• Roman Numerals with Perl Ⅵ by Arne Sommer (Reddit comments).
• Converting Decimal to Roman Numbers in Perl 6 by Joelle Maslak.
• Obiective Romanos grammaticam – Perl weekly challenge, week 10 by Francis Whittle.

Challenge #11 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week and the month of May.
• Jan-Olof Hendig updated the libuv library used by MoarVM, to version 1.29.1.
• Jonathan Worthington made entry to all spesh’d/JIT-compiled frames faster.
• Nick Logan made sure some UTF-8 decoding ops are JITted.
• Patrick Böker made sure that CMP files are properly cleaned up on Windows.
• Vadim Belman continued his work on the configuration subsystem. He also fixed some issues related to errors occurring during error reporting and assigning Nil to scalars with captured types. And finally, all his work in the past months to make use v6.e.PREVIEW work, was finally merged!
• Timo Paulssen fixed a problem with the profiler.
• Nick Wellnhofer fixed a problem with sorting 2-element lists with a mapper.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the built-in to-json converter about 60% faster. She also made List.reverse about 4x as fast.
• And quite a few other improvements and fixes.

Questions about Perl 6

Only 5 to go to get to the 1111 Perl 6 questions mark on StackOverflow!

• Is Perl 6 still “slow”? by qrpnxz.
• Use perl6 command with Git Bash on windows by Jessica Nowak.
• Sub vs Blocks – aka Roman Numbers Challenge by Martin Barth.
• Why/how is an additional variable needed in matching repeated arbitrary character with capture groups? by drclaw.
• Redefining ws in a grammar by JJ Merelo.
• How do I match a hex array in a grammar by tejas.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Please write a post! by Wendy van Dijk.
• Perl 6 at $work by Wendy van Dijk.
• On my phone by Jeff Goff.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• What’s next! by Quentin / Heart.
• A few seats left! by Jeff Goff.
• The only not-true thing by Justin Searls.
• Less noisy by 0racle.
• A Web API by JJ Merelo.
• Ran gag by Markus Vervier.
• Took it for a spin by firebreathingduck.
• Worth the wait by firebreathingduck.
• More traditional solutions by firebreathingduck.
• A database driven wiki by Perl Conferences.
• Exploring concurrent evolutionary algorithms by Grupo GeNeura Team.
• This weekend by JJ Merelo.
• Why doesn’t Ruby have grammars? by Todd A. Jacobs.
• Mine are up as well! by Jonathan Worthington.
• On my phone! by Gianni Ceccarelli.
• 6 is more by Quentin / Heart.
• Syntax highlighter by Alexey Melezhik.
• Installed on android by chenyf.
• Changes the way you program by Joelle Maslak.
• Community design by Innovation Quotes.
• Explaining FatRats by cliffor the big red pawg.
• Splat an on-demand supply by Gianni Ceccarelli.
• Ready for preorder by JJ Merelo.
• Another target for Semantic by JJ Merelo.
• Yet another Perl 6 book by chenyf.
• Running exercism on the phone by Daniel Mita.
• HTML::Lazy an amazing package by JJ Merelo.
• Careful by cms, this hard gemlike flame.
• Dreamt of it by Stéphane Payrard.
• Common mark implementation by Scimon Proctor.
• No more “print”? by Eirik Midttun.
• Also want to do Perl 6 by 正弦工社.
• My Perl 6 solutions by Joelle Maslak.
• Videos online by The Perl Shop.
• Nominating Perl 6 by 陳建勳.
• Every time by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Before I went to bed by Joelle Maslak.
• In case you missed it by ICYMI HN.

Perl 6 in comments

• Before Perl 6 by Ian Lance Taylor.
• Also before Perl 6 by hu3.
• Even less by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Really about Perl 5? by Ralph Mellor.
• Stopped using symbols by Ralph Mellor.
• All over again by Roboprog.
• Intuitively in practice by Ralph Mellor.
• Confused by balkenbrij.
• Can’t use for bencoded data by namibj.
• Not yet practical by nbiw.
• Also regularly released by aioeu.
• A twist on the original by Ralph Mellor.
• Blocks are closures by Ralph Mellor.
• Multiple paradigms for errors by Ralph Mellor.
• Don’t overthink it by Ralph Mellor.
• Proven to work well by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Constants::Sys::Socket, Constants::Net::If, Constants::Netinet::In by Travis Gibson.
• HTML::Lazy by Sam Gillespie.

Updated modules:

• Smack, Cofra by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Log::Timeline by Jonathan Worthington.
• OEIS by Tobias Boege.
• Result, Structable by Sam Gillespie.
• Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N, Gnome::Gdk by Marcel Timmerman.
• Term::Choose, Term::Choose, Term::Form, Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding Down

So many blog posts and so much discussion about Perl 6. Good to see! Please check in next week for more Perl 6 news.