2019.27 DeMythifying

Tyler Limkemann (aka aearnus) created quite a stir once again with a blog post titled “Perl 6 is Cursed! I hate it!” (subtitled: “… and other myths people tell themselves to sleep well at night…”). It got some positive reviews on /r/perl6 and on Facebook, but the Hacker News (~200 comments) and /r/programming (~150 comments) readers were generally much less enthusiastic, euphemistically speaking. And then there were some comments on Lobsters, /r/perl, r/programmingcirclejerk, /r/hackernews. It just goes to show there is still a long way to go to make Perl 6 more appreciated by many more people.

Cro 0.8.1 released

Jonathan Worthington proudly announced version 0.8.1 of Cro, the Perl 6 micro-services framework. This includes a new component called Cro::WebApp that provides HTML templating the Perl 6 way. And an updated version of Log::Timeline for keeping track of how long many asynchronously executing and overlapping tasks actually take.

PerlCon in Riga

With only a few weeks to go until the Perl Conference in Riga, organizer Andrew Shitov informs us that all conference tickets that were sold so far, have been sent. So if you registered and did not get the ticket, something is wrong and you probably need to check your email better.

There are 212 tickets for attendees now, of whom 186 are confirmed. That’s including 38 confirmed speakers. Furthermore, it has been confirmed that Booking.com has become a Silver Sponsor, and that ShadowCat, with support of the Enlightened Perl Organisation will be taking care of the video recording.

And of course, you can still buy a ticket for this excellent programme.

Leaving irc.perl.org

A sad story about the primary operator of irc.perl.org leaving. As Jeff Goff put it on Facebook: please thank the people that make everything happen behind the scenes every now and then. It is generally a thankless job: a token of appreciation every now and then is worth a lot! This caused comments on blogs.perl.org, Reddit and Hacker News.

Course Grant approved

Andrew Shitov‘s grant request to develop a complete Perl 6 course has been approved and funded by the TPF Grant Committee! (Facebook comments). Looking forward to the result!

Survey

JJ Merelo has published the results of this year’s Perl 6 Survey. Check it out!

TIOBE

Thanks to the work of Steven Penny, Perl 6 has now entered the TIOBE index at #93, as noted by JJ Merelo. So now is the time to blog about Perl 6! Since TIOBE searches for “Perl 6 programming”, please make sure to include that somewhere in your posts!

Squashathon

And what a Squashathon it was! This time aimed at adding as many mathematical sequences as possible. Quite a few got added, and some helper subs were created. And the winner is thundergnat! A plushy Camelia will be sent as soon as we know thundergnat’s whereabouts. (Facebook comments).

Tracing what’s missing

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer realized that grammars are just classes and used that to find out where parsing a log file failed without needing the Grammar::Debugger.

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week there were quite a few blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #15:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 15: Strong and Weak Primes and Vigenère Encryption by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• The Vigenère Cipher by Donald Hunter.
• Prime Vigenere and Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 15 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Laurent Rosenfeld took the opportunity to publish another blog post, inspired by the Perl Weekly Challenge, but this time focused on functional programming in Perl.

Damian Conway looked back on the challenge of the previous week with an excellent blog post titled “As simple as possible…but no simpler (Reddit, Hacker News comments). Again, highly recommended.

Mohammad S. Anwar started another series of blog posts. This time consisting of interviews with Perl Weekly Challenge winners, called “Meet The Champions”. So far there are two entries:

• Laurent Rosenfeld (Reddit comments).
• Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Meanwhile, Challenge #15 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Daniel Green fixed an issue with the MoarVM implementation of prime number checking. And he merged all of his work on changing native num to native int calculations in NQP (see PR #2670).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed signal so that you can specify an array of signals.
• And some more improvements and fixes, still in anticipation of the next Rakudo Perl 6 release, being prepared by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, Kane Valentine and Samantha McVey.

Questions about Perl 6

• How do I chase the provenance of a routine or method? by Aaron Sherman.
• Using $/ is not exactly the same as using any other variable in grammar actions by JJ Merelo.
• List return from Inline:Perl5 gives a count of items, not the list by Joseph Brenner.
• Mixing in methods by Aaron Sherman.
• Relative path inside a module by Antonio Gamiz Delgado.
• How do you call a function whose name is in a variable? by Antonio Gamiz Delgado.
• Are there any Perl 6 benchmarks over time relative to Perl 5? by TotalPerspective.
• Backreferences in regexes match, but do not capture by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• AoH to Aov by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Pushing the bounds of expressivity by Marc Chantreux.
• Best error handling pattern by Rebecca Turner.
• Experimenting with Perl 6 and hiring by Richard Foley.
• Interesting read by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• On Inline::Go by Alga Matsuo.
• Taking shape! by Antonio Gamiz Delgado.
• The last sentence by JJ Merelo.
• Unfamiliar Version Notation by こたつがめ.
• Community design by Sue Fisher.
• Equivalent strength? by wint: can (not) program.
• A great keynote to start the day by Andrew Shitov.
• Come parallel with me by Jonathan Worthington.
• Sign up! by Moritz Lenz.
• Perl 6 on the console by Andrew Shitov.
• Didn’t know about := by firebreathingduck.
• Have you tried Cro yet? by JJ Merelo.
• Cro features for developers by Jonathan Worthington.
• Using Log::Timeline by Jonathan Worthington.
• Useful dev tool by Walk #40.
• Can do fractions by Ani.
• Supposedly not? by 蟹ノ缶詰.
• Don’t know by 当代一流の困り手.
• Nobody but… by Walk #40.
• These ops make sense by JJ Merelo.
• Want to learn! by What’s FiveYellowMice’s problem?.
• Desparate for attention by Antoine Leblanc.
• Cannot make me believe by Marius Gedminas.
• Too close to center by isomorphisms.
• A very deep rabbit hole by Шаукат Амирханов.
• An upsurge of APL keycaps by יוספה בתיה ✡.
• Woop loudly by Alex Balhatchet.
• QPFRWDVUEELRBMVIEPNGJIASIE by Donald Hunter.
• Array contains an element? by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Not a Rat by Thaddee Tyl.
• Exists by Biappi.
• NO GIL by Walk #40.
• Go does not replace Python by Brad Gilbert.
• Out of date by Solomon Foster.
• On Myths by Simon Proctor.
• No Perl 6? by Mick Watson.
• Excess of cleverness by Giuseppe Maxia.
• Not inspiring much confidence by re:fl.64.
• Two votes by Albert Vilella.
• The worst ML by Previously, on Bruno’s feed.
• Not making me want by aoeupl phe.
• Sad by aoeupl phe.
• Stay in the major version forever by Thameera Senanayaka.
• Batshit insane by q3k.
• Not cursed by sai 🥝.
• Serious by Tyler Limkemann.
• Why no √? by %20｜1904 (-25).
• Without target demographic by Panta.
• TIL $x⚛++ by Johannes Schlüter.
• Really Angry by Tyler Limkemann.
• Only Perl 6 gets it right by Eλf Sternberg.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Perl 6 on the console by Andrew Shitov.

Perl 6 in comments

• Not popular at the moment by jasonhansel.
• Getting new devs by Ralph Mellor.
• Not included by jasonhansel.
• Now that it exists by jasonhansel.
• Tried it in Perl 6? by minimim.
• May even outlast by thesuperbigfrog.
• Different languages by roryrjb.
• Perl 6 finally meeting the needs of today’s 10x developers 🎉 by basiliskgf.
• On comments by Ralph Mellor.
• self vs this by Ralph Mellor.
• Lack of killer app by smitty1e.
• Similar, but different by Ralph Mellor.
• Same with Perl 6 by ksaj.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Proc::Feed by Jack Kuan.
• Cro::WebApp by Jonathan Worthington.
• Compress::Zstd by Timo Paulssen.
• Libarchive by Curt Tilmes.

Updated modules:

• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen.
• Digest::BubbleBabble by Ben Davies.
• FindBin, FileSystem::Parent, FindBin::libs by Steven Lembark.
• Log::Timeline, cro, Cro::Core, Cro::HTTP, Cro::TLS, Cro::WebSocket, Cro::ZeroMQ by Jonathan Worthington.
• Pod::Render by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding Down

What a week that was. Not a lot visually happening on the core, but so many things around it: new and updated modules, blog posts, squashathon. Looking forward to next week, for more Perl 6 news. See you then!