2019.31/32/33 And We’re Back!

Yes, the Perl 6 Weekly is back. If there is one thing yours truly has learned, that it is not a good idea to skip 2 issues. Once, in the past, maybe. But nowadays, it just almost gets too much to process while writing the weekly. And probably to read as well. Well, hoping not too much was missed in the past 3 weeks, let’s go!

PerlCon in Riga

The Riga video team has not found the time yet to create separate videos of the presentations yet. There are full days streams available though:

• Day 1: $room, @room, %room.
• Day 2: $room, @room, %room.
• Day 3: $room, @room, %room.

A number of participants have already posted reports of the event:

• PerlCon in Rīga by José Joaquín Atria.
• The PerlCon 2019 conference in Rīga behind the scene by Andrew Shitov (Reddit comments).
• PerlCon Riga 2019 by Kang-min Liu.
• PerlCon Europe 2019 by Dave Cross.
• PerlCon 2019 in Rīga (Reddit comments) and Topic Analysis of PerlCon 2019 talks by Thomas Klausner.
• The PerlCon 2019 Riga – Report by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Swiss Perl Workshop Videos

Thanks to Lee Johnson, the videos of the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 have become available. These are the ones with Perl 6 content:

• Demythifying Perl 6 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• ‎Perl 6, a language to rule them all‎ by JJ Merelo.
• Producing Perl 6 books with Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• Consistency & Interpolation by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Containers versus References by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Pheix: Perl6-based CMS with data storing on blockchain by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Bringing Perl 6 to Generation Z by Boris Däppen.

August Squashathon

Luis F. Uceta has become the winner of this month’s Documentation proofreading Squashathon. Thanks to all other participants: better luck winning a plushy Camelia next time!

Second tutorial: Fun with objects

David Cassel posted his second Perl 6 tutorial: Fun with Objects. It feels there is a Big Bang Theory reference somewhere in there.

Trials and Tribulations

Madeleine Goebel published two updates on her GSOC project:

• Trials and Tribulations with Modules: Part One
  
• Trials and Tribulations with Modules: Part Two

It is really good to see so much progress on a feature that could well become one of the unique selling points of Rakudo Perl 6!

D&D Rolls in Perl 6

Tyler Limkemann went out playing and came back with a very nice blog post about rolling dice (/r/perl6, /r/programming, /r/geek, /r/perl comments). He also created a very nice Unicode character property lister (Reddit comments).

Still stun me all these years later

Aaron Sherman looked at a JSON grammar and felt his head spin. He also used this opportunity to create a guide for other programming languages wanting to implement Perl 6 regular expressions (Reddit comments).

Dollar signs will not kill you

A rather interesting interview with Alan, user of obscure languages (Reddit comments).

Docker builds are your friend

Sterling Hanenkamp took his new blog for a spin with “Multi-stage Docker builds are your friend“. It shows how it helps him build a single end-product that’s uncluttered by extra build configuration and tooling.

Hilbert with Cairo inside GTK

Timo Paulssen got adventurous and live coded a Hilbert curve with Cairo inside of GTK.

Not A Dialect

Aaron Sherman explores the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 with excellent linguistic research and examples (Reddit comments).

Forest fire numbers

Aaron Sherman also did a little challenge of his own with “Fun little challenge: Forest Fire numbers“. One could wonder whether a submission for the Perl Weekly Challenge wouldn’t have been a better idea.

Electric Boogaloo

Jeff Goff posted another blog posts on templating in Perl 6 called “Templates II: Electric Boogaloo“.

Expanding .perl

Finally, Aaron Sherman started a re-evaluation of the .perl method, which resulted in a problem solving issue.

Perl Weekly Challenge #19

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #19:

• Word Wrapped Weekends, Perl 6 Edition by Arne Sommer.
• Greedy expression of the best months – Perl weekly challenge 19 by Francis Whittle.
• Perl 6 small stuff #21: it’s a date! …or: learn from an overly complex solution to a simple task by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 19 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Perl Weekly Challenge # 19: Weekends and Wrapping Lines by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl Weekly Challenge 19 by Roger Bell West.

Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge with “Greed is good, balance is better, beauty is best.” (Reddit comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge #20

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #20:

• Amicable Split with Perl 6 by Arne Sommer (Reddit comments).
• Perl Weekly Challenge 020 by Adam Russell.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 20 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Perl Weekly Challenge # 20: Split String on Character Change and Amicable Numbers by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl Weekly Challenge 20 by Roger Bell West.

Damian Conway again repeated his look back on the challenge with “With friends like these…” (Reddit, Hacker News comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge #21

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #21:

• Euler’s URL with Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.
• Implementing a spigot algorithm for the digits of e and Normalizing a URL with Parse::Yapp by Adam Russell.
• Perl Weekly Challenge # 21: Euler’s Number and URL Normalizing by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl Weekly Challenge 21 by Roger Bell West.

Meanwhile, Challenge #22 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of July.
• Stefan Seifert continued his excellent debugging work in the bowels of MoarVM, which improved the stability of MoarVM significantly. He also introduced a new debugging level, that causes a garbage collect on every allocation. He also fixed a race condition with precompilation.
• Ben Davies made socket family handling portable across OS’s.
• Timo Paulssen fixed various profiling issues and improved comments in the spesh log. And put in some optimizations.
• cygx added a function to MoarVM to run bytecode from memory and fixed the build on MingW systems.
• Jonathan Worthington implemented various optimizations, one of which saved 10% on a DBIish record insertion benchmark.
• Stéphane Payrard fixed the documentation of various nqp:: opcodes.
• Paweł Murias fixed various issues on the Javascript backend.
• ZhongnianTao added support for the GB2312 encoding (simplified Chinese).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with Date objects losing their formatter with certain operations.
• Vadim Belman fixed EVAL when run at compile time in the mainline of a precompiled module. He also made sure that each compiled setting knows of which language version it is.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed various issues on the JVM backend.
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Date object “forgets” formatter? by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Amazon DynamoDB with Perl 6? by barrontrump2025.
• Why can’t anything go in the body of a grammar proto? by guifa.
• How can you change the Perl 6 version you are using or install a new module for the one Comma uses? by JJ Merelo.
• How do you create custom metamodels for parametric types? by Ben Davies.
• What is the killer app? by Gustavo Di Pietro.
• Interpreting the output of the split function as an integer list / array by Romario.
• The R metaoperator apparently reverses lists too by JJ Merelo.
• How to sort dir results by directory age? by con.
• Variable getting overwritten in for loop by Abeer (Reddit comments).
• Is Perl 5 or Perl 6 still worth learning in 2019? by grepgeek (Reddit comments).
• What is Perl 6 good for? by Eihab Hala Hala.
• Exception thrown when adding an element into a SetHash declared as state %set is SetHash[Str] inside a loop by 850.
• What was the tl;dr of the ‘Perl 6 performance update’ at PerlCon? by TotalPerspectiv.
• Use of implicit parameter in for-loop causes hang by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• rakudobrew cannot build moar by con.
• What is the best way to flush precompiled modules? by Steve Roe.
• Some regex questions not clear in the docs by Aaron Sherman.
• Concurrency, react-ing to more than one Supply at a time by Holli.
• Lookahead with capture by Jo King.
• Grammar and unicode characters by hythm.
• Remote debugging? by Nadim Khemir.
• Good data science modules? by Ilja Leedulane.
• Match all punctuations except . and " by lisprogtor.
• How can an existing knowhow be made parametric? by Ben Davies.
• Is there still a race condition? by Holli.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Show me the Perl 6 code! by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Areas in MUD by Æþer Portal.
• Livecoding in GTK and Cairo by Timo Paulssen.
• Doc just better by Pierre Chapuis.
• Find months by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Easy building packages by Æþer Portal.
• Building blocks by Sean Gold.
• Versioning at import site by Patrick Flor.
• Want it to disappear by Keke.
• Much faster with JIT by 齊藤 (tails).
• Dodo crashed by John Hearns.
• nm to Perl  translator by Jeff Goff.
• Lot of syntax by Æþer Portal.
• Term::Readkey on Windows by José Lula da Silva.
• It’s a date by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Supertype composition by Brian T. Rice.
• All Perl 6 libraries by Æþer Portal.
• Almost enjoyable by Garth Mortensen.
• Converted to Perl 6 by chenyf.
• Massive Osborne by Boris Lenhard.
• Excited to see by okuson.
• Will not replace by Jacques_Lemire.
• Rationals pretty much the same way by Brad Gilbert.
• Embed code in regular expressions by Brad Gilbert.
• @ represents Positional by Brad Gilbert.
• Sufficient for what I need by Ted Davis.
• Mutate until it is that language by Brad Gilbert.
• Why the tedium? by Sean Gold.
• Dependencies managed with Nix by Æþer Portal.
• Monads! by Ben Davies.
• No mutable globals, no problems by Æþer Portal.
• Like the socket stuff by Simon Proctor.
• New language? by スマートコン.
• Passing functions through Channels by Simon Proctor.
• Find a job by 虚.
• Some time to invest by Sean Gold.
• App for searching and displaying by Æþer Portal.
• Friends? by Sankrant Chaubey.
• Crochet! by @doomyflo@framapiaf.
• Py Shoutout to graphemes by Vicky Brasseur.
• Uploading to Cachix by Æþer Portal.
• No issues by Florian Gilcher ∠(・.-)―〉 →◎.
• Dirty hands by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Simple load testing tool by The Perl Shop.
• Reverse dependencies, please? by Jonathan Stowe.
• Awaiting your args by Repl.it.
• What about… by Zuzak.
• On Command Line heroes by Egg Freckles.
• It’s Perlish by Sean Gold.
• Uri testing, please by Jonathan Stowe.
• New book in town by JJ Merelo.
• Only if you want it to be by Joab Jackson.
• How to call JS functions on JS backend? by Code Examples [ja].
• Hard to make real stuff by Sean Gold.
• Not on CPAN? by moznion.
• Still very excited by 2gua.
• Will sit in the same position by matsumuratomonori.
• Perl 6 Talk! by Anagura Yakumo.
• Talking about optimization by Mark Keating.
• Watching via stream by Tom Ryder.
• Succeeded in speeding up by Anagura Yakumo.
• 20x faster by Anagura Yakumo.
• Many new faces by Mark Keating.
• Beating Ruby! by Anagura Yakumo.
• Generally similar by Søren Lund.
• Starting with… by JJ Merelo.
• Pity EA is taken by JJ Merelo.
• Starting the Advent Calendar by JJ Merelo.
• Apocrypha here by JJ Merelo.
• Run from anywhere by JJ Merelo.
• The same with Perl 5 by パピッ.
• On Docker, Perl 6 and Travis by Mark Keating.
• Great comparison by 𝙱𝚛𝚢𝚌𝚎 𝚀𝚞𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗.
• Highlights by The Perl Shop.
• Beautiful and expressive by Sean Gold.
• Command line utility tests! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Porting to other languages by Reddit4Devs.
• Curious about static type checking by ペンを入れたまま服を洗わない.
• About to start by Søren Lund.
• Seriously suggested changing the name by Dave Cross.
• Talk about doing stuff by JJ Merelo.
• TIOBE? Not so well by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
• Enjoyed console oriented sites by Søren Lund.
• Sometimes a topic by プリズムリバーの人.
• Not really a micro-service, but still Cro by JJ Merelo.
• Many beautiful snippets by Søren Lund.
• Writing your own template language by Jeff Goff.
• Hard to get a job by Simon Proctor.
• Parsed and curious by Carl Mäsak.
• Perl’s real mom by خانوم توت فرنگی 🍓.
• On constraint programming by Søren Lund.
• Where? the next one by Denis Fedoseev.
• Start of string / line by Regular Expression.
• How and Why? by Roberto Clapis (GMT -7) 🏳️‍🌈 🇪🇺.
• Real life exception handling by Sean Gold.
• Ready Just In Time by JJ Merelo.
• All 44 in CommaIDE by JJ Merelo.
• Concurrency update by JJ Merelo.
• I joined #perl6-dev by Anagura Yakumo.
• The PerlCon effect by Job Achterberg.
• Seems to have promise and supply by Anagura Yakumo.
• Accurate floating point numbers by kamimura.
• Parallel is easy by Anagura Yakumo.
• Elegant Perl 6 code by Søren Lund.
• Meta-computation by Anagura Yakumo.
• Why not? by no one.
• Evolutionary smaller by JJ Merelo.
• Fresh and new by JJ Merelo.
• Just heard concurrent evolutionary algorithm by Anagura Yakumo.
• xx creates an array? by Anagura Yakumo.
• Becoming hot by Anagura Yakumo.
• Using 8 threads by Anagura Yakumo.
• It’s cool, right? by 𝙖𝙨_𝙞𝙣𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢𝙖́𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙤 ♠️.
• Differences by JJ Merelo.
• How to be Rational by Anagura Yakumo.
• Clear regularity by Anagura Yakumo.
• Always amazing by Anagura Yakumo.
• Number of neat differences by Simon Proctor.
• Perl 6? by Luc N. Vu.
• End of string / line by Regular Expression.
• Cool at using Unicode by Timur Ismagilov.
• To give them lobotomies by best of the 80s, 90s, and today.
• Define operators? by Xah Lee.
• It amazes me by Timur Ismagilov.
• Old is new by Jathan McCollum.
• Quite annoying by Zah Lee.
• The end of 007 by Carl Mäsak.
• Tomty released soon by Alexey Melezhik.
• Reproducible packages by Æþer Portal.
• Split capturing and grouping by 🍀 🌳 eevee 🌳 🍀.
• Dot segments by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• To be conversant by Sean Gold.
• Hope you got the message by Winfred Raj.
• Rename? by JJ Merelo.
• With promises! by Adam Russell.
• Anything in production? by Youssuf ElKalay.
• Impression of Perl 5 too deep by CnBeta.
• More women participating by Joelle Maslak.
• Excursions into Perl 6 space by Carl Mäsak.
• 500+ solutions! by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Die parser by Thomas Munn.
• Reading deep dive by Anagura Yakumo.
• Showing off .squish by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Never stops impressing by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• A walk in the park by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Simpler version by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
• Restrospective? by Claudio Ramirez.
• Awesome explanation by Simon Proctor.
• Opinion on readability? by सुमन खनाल.
• An idiot can learn! by Sean Gold.
• Torturing with some Welsh by The Perl Shop.
• Right tool by ryn1x.
• That’s it! by mattn＠有益情報.
• Exciting bandit by RMS门下走狗.
• Sinful incompatibility by 2104san.
• Generating bytecode by JJ Merelo.
• Testing new infra by JJ Merelo.
• Brain stretching by Søren Lund.
• No forward references by Carl Mäsak.
• No app to update Perl by ウェブアイドル = 矢澤めうめう.
• Slides uploaded by Herbert Breunung.
• Making more sense by Sean Gold.
• Exciting by Anagura Yakumo.
• Does it exist? by きしもと.
• A schism like… by Sasa Blagojevic.
• Killed by fratricide by Angelos Karageorgiou.
• Solve in Perl 6 first by Simon Proctor.
• Obn Command Line Heroes by brian d foy.
• Kamikaze joke by Brian Pardy.
• Comparing users by hiratara.
• Not a target for migration by TANI_Röhei@赭埴菴.
• Splits more fashionable by Kevin.
• At 22nd place by JJ Merelo.
• Even numbers by Shoichi Kaji.
• Audience of one by Adam Leventhal.
• Could not be conceived by Carl Mäsak.
• Hello world by Etaoin Shrdlu.
• Shocking answer by JJ Merelo.
• Handling infinite lists by ActiveState.
• Hopefully ending confusion by JJ Merelo.
• There are killer apps! by JJ Merelo.
• Startup time? by JJ Merelo.
• Two talks already by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Computer science education! by Tobi Oetiker.
• Hopes for quicker adoption by René Moser.
• Paperwork to App by JJ Merelo.
• Postcards to Larry by Andrew Shitov.
• Eating your own book by JJ Merelo.
• Good reporting by Paul Evans.
• Hello world again by JackFly26.
• For the kids by Joelle Maslak.
• Happy with book by alberto fernandez.
• It’s expressive by JJ Merelo.
• Too much to understand by eexpss.
• Slides on CMS on blockchain by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Help testing reverse dependencies, please? by Jonathan Stowe.
• Generation Z by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Slides of PerlCon talks by Jonathan Worthington.
• Not Perl 6 by Albaro Pereyra.
• Zef not working by Sean Gold.
• Perl 6 instead by Sourav Datta.
• Teaching programming by JJ Merelo.
• Really really cool by Tyler Limkemann.
• Looks better, eh? by Ibnu D. Aji.
• B and C problems by こたつがめ.
• Thanks to everyone! by alberto fernandez.
• Shape up like Perl 6? by Philipp Krenn.
• Weird Perl 6 code by Spencer.
• Will change everything by Nathan Naze.
• Like Half Life 3 by Michael Friedrich.
• Writing since this morning by Anagura Yakumo.
• Japanese “No” by Anagura Yakumo.
• Red examples by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Parrot on the cover by James Raden.
• Maybe with Perl 6 by Anagura Yakumo.
• A situation by Ryan Zezeski.
• Investigating results by けこやな.
• Perl 6 reviewer for Weekly Challenge by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Findbin::libs in Perl 6 by The Perl Shop.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• At a CPAN near you by Jeff Goff.
• Film at 11 by Mark Gardner.
• Binary ready by Jeff Goff.
• Not this week by Wendy van Dijk.
• Spotted a typo! by Wendy van Dijk.
• Writing your own TT by Jeff Goff.
• Enjoying in Olten by Wendy van Dijk.
• Two more books by Wendy van Dijk.
• Message from FOSDEM by Wendy van Dijk.
• Need help testing URI by Jonathan Stowe.
• Not a mega team by Wendy van Dijk.
• How people feel here, is irrelevant by Gustavo Di Pietro.
• From Olten, at the SPW by Wendy van Dijk.
• Postcards for Larry by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Module availability problem by Marcel Timmerman.
• DEPRECATED routine by Marcel Timmerman.
• Help with Perl 6 script by Rui Fernandes.
• Flat a lazy gather? by Marc Chantreux.
• Core dump by ToddAndMargo.
• Type name limit? by Mark Devine.
• Checking if a certain object is present in Array by Mikkel.
• Subscripting with a list of slices by Sean McAfee.
• Retaining $/.pos after an unsuccessful match without a temporary variable? by Raymond Dresens.

Perl 6 in comments

• Recursive descent grammar by jdoege.
• Redone the grammar by Ralph Mellor.
• My own focus by Ralph Mellor.
• Compatibility mode by kamaal.
• Secret sauce by Ralph Mellor.
• Pretty cool by 6thaccount2.
• Usually don’t need to by yellowapple.
• Jealous of expressivity by redka.
• AKA by mirceal.
• What’s holding back? by jai_.
• Not all implemented? by Izkata.
• Chaining and piping by Ralph Mellor.
• Look at Perl 6 grammars by earenndil.
• Perl 6 Grammars by jcamou.
• If renamed by zhouzhen1.
• Food for thought by Ralph Mellor.
• Like Perl 5 vs Perl 6 by rhabarba.
• Without splitting the community by skrebbel.
• No sigils? by emilper.
• Covering three approaches by Ralph Mellor.
• All that and shiny by Ralph Mellor.
• Rational numbers built-in by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• De-structuring by Ralph Mellor.
• No forward declarations by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• VCard by Marcel Timmerman.
• Template::Prometheus by Patrick Spek.
• Docker::API by Curt Tilmes.
• Console::Blackjack by Greg Donald.
• Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated modules:

• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3, Tinky::Hash, Gnome::Gtk3::Glade, Auth::SCRAM, Decimal, GraphQL::Html, Library, TMap, PKCS5, Rdf, SemiXML, UEncoding, MongoDB, Neo4j, Semaphore::ReadersWriters, Unicode::PRECIS, XML::Actions, Config::DataLang::Refine, Gnome::Glib by Marcel Timmerman.
• Sparrow6, Tomtit by Alexey Melehzhik.
• Libui by Travis Gibson.
• Physics::Measure by Steve Roe.
• App::nm2perl6 by Jeff Goff.
• Algorithm::NaiveBayes by Itsuki Toyota.
• String::Fold by Patrick Spek.
• Supply::Timeout by Cono.
• Template::Classic by Chloé Kekoa.
• Findbin, FileSystem::Parent by Steven Lembark.
• Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata.
• Module::Pod by Doeg Schrag.
• OEIS by Tobias Boege.
• Trait::Env by Simon Proctor.
• Bailador by Martin Barth.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Winding Down

At PerlCon in Riga, yours truly announced that she would open up a problem solving” issue, in which she would ask to rename the “Perl 6 Programming Language” to (eventually) “The Raku Programming Language”. (/r/perl, /r/perl6, perl6-users, Facebook, Lobsters comments).

Some selected comments from the issue itself (in chronological order):

• Claudio Ramirez
• Tadeusz Sośnierz
• Damian Conway
• Samantha McVey
• pistachio
• Luis F. Uceta
• Damian Conway
• Jonathan Worthington
• Peter Scott
• Jonathan Worthington
• Moritz Lenz
• Carl Mäsak

After getting a better idea on how this would work, this resulted in a Pull Request, which is currently under review. If this pull request gets accepted by all reviewers, then this will cause “Perl 6” to be renamed to “Raku”.

And with that out of the way for now: next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will most likely be delayed, or possibly skipped altogether, due to yours truly travelling for some non-Perl related events. So, if not next week, see you in two weeks time then for more Perl 6 news!

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2019.30 Released Again

Shortly after the 2019.07 Rakudo compiler release, it was discovered that it has some issues with the build system that affect packaging. At the same time, some important stability and reliability fixes were committed in MoarVM. So Samantha McVey did a MoarVM point release, and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev put an NQP and Rakudo 2019.07.1 compiler release together. A Rakudo Star release is now expected to appear soon.

Comma Community Release

Jonathan Worthington announced the 2019.07 Comma Community Release, the IDE of choice for Perl 6 application development. This new release adds a very exciting visualizer for Log::Timeline output, which is very useful for visualizing asynchronous workflows and understanding parallelization.

Proofreading Squashathon

Around Saturday 3 August, there will be a documentation proofreading Squashathon. On this monthly Bug Squash day, people all over the world get together online for virtual pizza, and possibly win a plushy Camelia. Check it out: proofreading documentation shouldn’t be too hard, should it?

Implementing the GB2312 encoding

Kudo’s to ZhongnianTao for their work on implementing the GB2312 encoding. Somehow this fell through the cracks the past weeks. Looking forward to more of these in the future!

YODO

David P. Kendal, with a simple announcement on the #perl6 IRC channel, has taken the old and venerable IRC bot yoleaux offline. She will be missed. David P. Kendal, thanks for running it for all those years! Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev expects to have a replacement bot up and running soon.

Amuse-bouche

Jeff Goff describes his foray into the name mangling that is needed for working with external C++ libraries in A Regex amuse-bouche (Facebook comments).

On Math::Matrix

Herbert Breunung elaborates on his work on the Math::Matrix module and his future plans for it. All comments, remarks, suggestions will appreciated (Twitter comments).

On Physics::Measure

Steve Roe has returned to the Perl 6 blogging fold with Mind the gap, announcing the alpha release of the Physics::Measure module.

Family

cygx has created a Perl Language Family page (Reddit comments).

Load Testing

Simon Proctor had to do some load testing and reached for Perl 6. The result, after using a one-liner for prototyping, is a very nice blog post with a complete script for doing load testing as a bonus.

Boggling swiggles

Aaron Sherman realized that you can sometimes be tempted to write potentially linenoisy code in Perl 6. But that there is a way around it, in My swiggles are getting boggled.

Powershell Application testing

Alexey Melezhik shows how to use Sparrow6 for testing Powershell applications.

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week’s blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #18:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 18: Longest Common Substrings, Priority Queues, and a Functional Object System and Perl Weekly Challenge # 18: Priority Queues and Binary Heaps In Perl 6 by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Substrings and Queues with Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.

Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge of the previous week with two excellent blog posts, titled “Six Slices of Pie” (Facebook, Reddit, private comments) and “Chopping substrings“.

Meanwhile, Challenge #19 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a number of issues with ConcBlockingQueue, spesh, autoboxing, big integer operations, string operations, and slurpy argument handling, all of which could cause memory corruption if a Garbage Collect would kick in at a vulnerable time.
• Samantha McVey updated Unicode and collation support to version 12.1.
• Patrick Böker fixed a problem with linking of build runners and made perl6 an .EXE file on Windows.
• Vadim Belman made sure that Map objects may contain containers, to fix an issue with exporting scalar containers. This is potentially a breaking change, as this also makes Map an object, rather than a value type. May be reverted depending on error reports the coming weeks and/or ecosystem fallout.
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Permissions on flatpak by Tim van den Langenbergh.
• Calculate the average of an int array at once using reduce by Romario.
• Math with undefined values by Sean.
• Passing variables in proto regex with grammar by guifa.
• How do you distribute Perl 6 programs to desktop users? by barrontrump2052.
• How do you time out non-external code? by Aaron Sherman.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Alan Kay‘s OOP vision by MaMo.
• WSL and Term::Readkey by ryn1x.
• In the silence of computing by Sean Gold.
• Tried to say by timeler.
• Saving links by Brian Wisti.
• Bored by 박규현.
• Super easy by Simon Proctor.
• First version in Haskell by Bruce Payette.
• Take a look by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• A sober life by Sean Gold.
• Mascots by Paul Fenwick.
• A little script by Simon Proctor.
• No book can teach this by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Which is the future? by Junnama Noda.
• Delightful to use by draxil.
• Worth learning? by Amit Kumar Yadav.
• How did you decide? by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Why I love… by Kane Valentine.
• New Comma! by JJ Merelo.
• Frikkin extravagant by ᴼᴳ ᵀᴴᴼᵀᴴ.
• Multiple step migrations by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Lax, but good review by Sean Gold.
• Want to do a presentation by Andrew Shitov.
• Comparing by 齊藤 (tails).
• Proofreading by JJ Merelo.
• My MAIN trap by Stéphane Payrard.
• Word boundaries by Regular Expression.
• See you at WebPerl by Hauke Dämpfling.
• Doing initiatives automatically by Solomon Foster.
• Just brute-forcing it by Simon Proctor.
• Not so scary phasers by Sean Gold.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Need a lunch break by Jeff Goff.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

It appears I missed a few weeks of mails on the perl6-user mailing list. These have not been mentioned before in the Perl 6 Weekly:

• Documentation translation effort? by Marc Chantreux.
• [golf?] list of matches by Marc Chantreux.
• is inlinable trait missing from docs by Marcel Timmerman.
• while(<>){...} analog? by Joseph Brenner.

Perl 6 in comments

• One of the killer features by yellowapple.
• Simple, yet powerful by Ralph Mellor.
• On precedence by Ralph Mellor.
• Without brokenness by Ralph Mellor.
• Composable multi-threading by cygx.
• On roles and subsets by Ralph Mellor.
• A level playing field by Ralph Mellor.
• Losing mindshare by kamaal.
• Like Perl 5 and Perl 6 by pritambaral.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Date::Calendar::Hebrew by Jean Forget.

Updated modules:

• Date::Calendar::FrenchRevolutionary by Jean Forget.
• Gnome::Gdk3 , Gnome::Gtk3 , Gnome::Gtk3::Glade, Gnome::GObject by Marcel Timmerman.
• PDF::Font::Loader, PDF::ISO_32000 by David Warring.
• IO::Socket::Async::SSL, Concurrent::Stack, Concurrent::Queue by Jonathan Worthington.
• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• Async::Workers by Vadim Belman.

Winding Down

After a week of record temperatures, it looks like a more normal summertime ahead for the coming weeks. In which yours truly will take a 3-week break from this weekly post about the Perl 6 Programming Language. For a number of reasons: preparing for a keynote presentation at PerlCon in Riga, travel to/from Riga on the next two Mondays, and generally needing a bit away from the churning of the Perl community. So, unless someone else takes over Perl 6 Weekly’s responsabilities, the next Perl 6 weekly will be arriving around the 19th of August. See you then!

2019.29 Released

After tremendous effort of all involved, specifically Samantha McVey, Kane Valentine and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, there is a new Rakudo Perl 6 Compiler Release: 2019.07. This release is the result of over 4 months of development (Facebook comments).

Claudio Ramirez immediately followed this up with packages for quite a number of different Linux distributions (usage instructions).

Since this is the first release that uses the completely new, revamped build system (by Vadim Belman and Patrick Böker), it is expected that some issues may still become apparent in the coming weeks. Please bear with us while the Perl 6 Programming Language is getting an industrial strength build system.

Madeline still on a roll

Madeleine Goebel has been very busy and reports on her substantial progress on her GSOC project in Flags and Syscalls and Modules, Oh My!. She promises another blog post during the week because this one was getting too long.

Sparrow6 Released

Alexey Melezhik has announced that the Perl 6 version of Sparrow has been released to CPAN! Which is the result of a 6-month project.

A Clean Start

Jeff Goff has restarted his blog site “The Perl Fisher”, in which he will take a slightly different approach to blog posting about grammars than before.

Basic NativeCall

Andrew Shitov has published a blog post titled “Basic usage of NativeCall in Perl 6, in which he gives an introduction to NativeCall, the Perl 6 technology that allows you to call C functions from your Perl 6 code.

A Perl 6 Webring

cygx decided it is time to party like it’s 1999 with an old-style Webring, dedicated to Perl 6. It has four sites so far.

Grammar Talk at PerlCon

Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ will be giving a presentation about parsing grammars at PerlCon in Riga. He’s made his presentation notes available so that people can spot any errors with regards to Perl 6 grammars beforehand (Reddit comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week’s blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #17:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 17: Ackermann Function and Parsing URLs by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Ackermann Challenge by Aaron Sherman (Reddit comments).
• Up, up and Away! by Veesh Goldman (Reddit comments).
• Multitudinal Uniform Resource Parsing – Perl weekly challenge, week 17 by Francis Whittle.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 17 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Ackerman, URL and Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.

Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge of the previous week with an excellent blog post titled “Vigenère vs Vigenère.

Meanwhile, Challenge #18 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Ben Davies fixed a bug in pointer arithmetic for inlined CArrays in CStruct and CPPStruct REPRs.
• Gerd Pokorra found and fixed a problem in the configuration process.
• Timo Paulssen improved the error message when a process fails to be spawned and fixed various confprog issues.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a combinatorial explosion in deopt logging, that could cause the spesh thread to block an application for multiple seconds. He also fixed various issues in profiling / coverage / debug code, specifically in multi-threaded code.
• Daniel Green JITted several unicode related opcodes.
• Patrick Böker fixed several build problems, specifically one on the GCC 5 compiler. And he added documentation on doing binary releases.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev added a support script to manage Github releases.
• Chloé Kekoa fixed a problem with string interpolation using { }.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a race issue involving meta-ops that could cause segfaults in the worst case.
• And quite a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Trouble using the cro command-line tool as documented by zb226.
• Has anyone ported a Par Packer equivalent to Perl 6? by kkrev.
• Some very strange performance issues in given/when/if by Aaron Sherman.
• Debian packages up-to-date? by Ilja Leedulane.
• Implementing iterable classes with the Iterable and Iterator roles by uzlxxxx.
• Capture and execute multiline code and incorporate result by Suman Khanal.
• Regex assertions working only in lookahead and lookbehind fashion by JJ Merelo.
• Trying to create cached dynamic methods, but confused by Aaron Sherman.
• Read raw keyboard on Windows by José Lula Livre X..
• P6opaque, Str vs simple Str types — follow up by lisprogtor.
• min and max of mixed Str and Int arguments by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A Progress Report by The Perl Shop.
• Add a Perl 6 Section by JJ Atria.
• Watch the talk (no pressure, eek!) by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
• Still not fully implemented by Sébastien Douche.
• Text::LDIF into Cro::LDAP by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Pulp! by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Don’t need to worry about calculation errors by 八雲アナグラ.
• Want to give back by Tyler Limkemann.
• Day 1 of “Arabic” Perl 6 module by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Concurrently safe by Rebecca Turner.
• Solved in Perl 6 by inamori.
• Tired by technopagan.
• Too deep to know by 可視性 Enumeration.
• Mature regular expressions by halvarflake.
• Do what you want by ryn1x.
• Sigils make it easier by that guy who always replies “nice” to 69.
• Both hemispheres by ryn1x.
• Hell, no by Michael Mburu.
• Marxist language by Pannekoek.
• Easier to read regexes by wint: you can (not) program.
• Get the Community Edition by JJ Merelo.
• On categorize by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Lack of clarity by Alasdair Allan.
• It’s getting there by Rob Myers.
• On a phone by Æþer Portal.
• You will want to write them by 硫​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​酸​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​鶏@バ先募.
• Try googling by Мима Даликов.
• Really compelling by Sean Gold.
• Faster implementation by Simon Proctor.
• No more random gibberish by Simon Proctor.
• Seems to be a dead end as well by Edsger Lin.
• Swapping grammars dynamically by Nika Layzell.
• Running on 2019.07 by Lance Wicks.
• Back to green by JJ Merelo.
• Improve it for you! by Jonathan Worthington.
• Inheritanc vs composition by Jonathan Worthington.
• Creating code from a database schema by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Bird, like inspec and goss by Alexey Melezhik.
• Flip it! by Jonathan Stowe.
• Better still by MaMo.
• unicomb? by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Working files! by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• All PR’s addressed by JJ Merelo.
• Pandoc in Perl 6 by Æþer Portal.
• Nativecall works! by Tyler Limkemann.
• DOSed my own computer by Jonathan Stowe.
• Easy and straightforward by Joelle Maslak.
• On your Ferrari? by memorystomp.
• Compile to ELF! by 八雲アナグラ.
• Putting bytecode into a C program by 八雲アナグラ.
• Trying out Z-tools by 八雲アナグラ.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Sneaked into my dissertation by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.

Perl 6 in comments

• Managing teardown by Ralph Mellor.
• A language in its own right by pushpop.
• Perl 6-ification? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• On forgiving parsers by Ralph Mellor.
• Why it’s okay for Perl 6 to have “Perl” in its name. by Shred_Alert.
• Relational operators in pattern matching by Ralph Mellor.
• Jumped the shark by mcdermott.
• On resuming by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Matrix::Bot::Plugin::AutoAcceptInvites by Patrick Spek.
• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated modules:

• App::MoarVM::ConfprogCompiler by Timo Paulssen.
• Matrix::Bot by Patrick Spek.
• Tomtit, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Failable by Ben Davies.
• ProcStats by Steven Lembark.
• Async::Workers by Vadim Belman.

Winding Down

With another heatwave coming up on many of the places where people work with Perl 6, yours truly hopes everybody will be able to survive. Please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!

2019.28 Perl 6 文档之 – 语言

Chenyf announced with a very modest tweet that the documentation of the Perl 6 Programming Language has been translated to Chinese. What an amazing piece of work! Looking forward to see many more Chinese programmers use Perl 6.

At long last

David Cassel has started a series of tutorials teaching the basics of the Perl 6 programming language. The first of these titled: “Getting Started, at Long Last, on Perl 6” takes you on the path to installing Rakudo Perl 6 and trying some small code examples. With as takeaway:

I’ll tell you this: playing around with Perl 6 is a lot of fun!

(Facebook comments).

Myths revisited

After last week’s Internet stormlet about Perl 6 Myths, cygx decided to make a better overview of Perl 6 Myths, which sparked some Reddit comments. One comment about the original blog post by chromatic, and a reply by Ralph Mellor, stood out for yours truly.

PerlCon in Riga

Another week, another newsletter, with nice postcards. And the following confirmed presentations with Perl 6 content:

• Keynote by Larry Wall
• How Moose made me a bad OO programmer by Tadeusz Sośnierz.
• Apocrypha: stories about Perl 6 documentation by JJ Merelo.
• Perl 6 performance update by Jonathan Worthington.
• Recent PAUSE Changes by Kenichi Ishigaki.
• Parsing confidently by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯.
• How to build traditional Perl interpreters by Takahiro Shimizu.
• Perl 6 for beginners by Jens Rehsack.
• DeMythifying Perl 6 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• WebPerl – Run Perl in the Browser! by Hauke Dämpfling.
• Console oriented sites and Perl 6: joining the worlds together by Igor Chubin.
• When Cro is not a Web Framework: implementing LDAP for Perl 6 by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• The parsed and the curious: macros for Perl 6 by Carl Mäsak.
• Constraint Programming in Perl 6 by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• What I learned about SQL in 2018 by Max Maischein.
• goto considered useful by Herbert Breunung.
• Perl 6 Concurrency by Jonathan Worthington.
• ASN.1 for Perl 6: with elegance and metacompilation by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Genesis: Concurrent evolutionary algorithms in Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• What can you do with YAML in 2019? by Tina Müller.
• Easy as Six by Arne Sommer.

Which makes 21 presentations with Perl 6 content on a total of 55 presentations (excluding Lightning Talks).

It is to be expected that Larry Wall will be autographing with stamp and four colours of ink. And Curtis ‘Ovid’ Poe will also be there!

Believe it or not, you can still buy a ticket for this excellent programme.

Madeline on a roll again

After a short hiatus, Madeleine Goebel is at it again for her Google Summer of Code project, with 2 blog posts this week:

• And Now For Something Completely Different.
• Modifying Perl 6 Executable to Run Bytecode
  .

More GSOC reporting

Antonio Gomiz Delgado also reported about his progress on his GSOC project on the Perl 6 documentation. Such as the capability to regenerate HTML files, and continuous integration testing. And he is inviting comments and feature requests!

My new calculator

Someone with the nick Shred_alert mentioned that the killer application for Perl 6 has been found: REPL has become my new calculator.

Perl and future

Jens Rehsack has written a blog post on LinkedIn: Perl and Future, in which he asks for a authoritative and definitive answer for the question whether Perl 6 is a Perl (/r/perl, /r/perl6, Facebook comments).

JIT Compiler

Bart Wiegmans reports on the progress of his work on the JIT compiler expression backend, which will allow expressions with floating points to be completely JITted to machine code. Cool stuff!

Celebrate Programming Verbosity

Richard Smith has written a blog post about the fine line between expressiveness and complexity. A quote:

But verbosity should be celebrated. It’s what will make my code easier to read now, later, and by the rest of my team. And even though I’ll have more lines, I’ll also have less bugs.

Which caused a lot of comments on Reddit.

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week’s blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #16:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 16: Pythagoras Pie and Perl Weekly Challenge # 16: Bitcoin Addresses by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Pythagoras Bitcoin with Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.
• Perl Weekly Challenge #016 by Athanasius.

Damian Conway again looked back on the challenge of the previous week with an excellent blog post titled “Infinite work is less work (/r/perl, /r/perl6 and Hacker News comments). What is there to be said? Highly recommended!

In the “Champions” series of blog posts, Mohammad S. Anwar this time interviewed Joelle Maslak (Reddit comments).

Meanwhile, Challenge #17 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Daniel Green provided JITting of several often used nqp::opcodes.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a build issue.
• Timo Paulssen fixed a bug in profiling multi-threaded programs.
• Vadim Belman fixed / reimplemented large parts of PseudoStash handling and made it possible to define new symbols in the 6.e setting.
• 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

• Cannot overload logical operators (or, and) for my class by gmoshkin.
• Bug in rule for string by blippage.
• How do I access the optional parts of a grammar? by blippy.
• Multiple MAIN signatures by Antonio Gamiz Delgado.
• How often are modules updated? by solpaadjustmadisar.
• P6opaque, Str vs simple Str types by lisprogtor.
• Can’t run script on MSYS2-64 by Romario.
• Question about the MAIN subroutine by uzlxxxx.
• Can methods be treated as regular subroutines? by uzlxxxx.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Should atomicity be part of the operation? by Johannes Schlüter.
• Specification and implementation separated by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• How to ²√ by Timo Paulssen.
• Easter Egg by that guy who always replies “nice” to 69.
• Weird putting in context by Tyler Limkemann.
• Someone in its corner by simulacrum party.
• The first agglutinative programming language? by Mike Samuel.
• Perl 6 by tests by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Matching comma separated values by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Not the Perl we used to know by Clint Valentine.
• Let’s upgrade by MFA Required.
• Not the same? by Takayuki.
• Where is it used? by 俺の人生 flatMap.
• Remember by sat.
• Boom in one year by Yoshiya / ひのさわ / かた(肩).
• Can’t remember by cranebird.
• Highlighting Truffle by :craftsman/kawasima.
• Feeling like John Lennon by Matthew Persico.
• Safe to use any name by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Oh dear by Erez 🤓.
• I guess I’ll wait by Erez 🤓.
• Incredible by Sam Lø.
• Makes me think of Perl 6 by Job.
• Will there be video? by Philip S.
• Perl reimplemented by 八雲アナグラ.
• 😉 by José Lula Livre X..
• Like Perl 6 by Carl Mäsak.
• Bulk clone by Mike Clarke.
• Real Perl by elcondor.
• How is it going? by 齊藤貴義＠サイバーメガネ.
• Highlights getting messed up by ドッグ.
• Please adopt Perl 6’s grammars by Yuvi Panda.
• Pulling a Fortran by Andrew Sherrod.
• Z is cool by Joelle Maslak.
• Writing about fiascos by catcoder 😺.
• Define a postfix x by Matt Trout.
• Also turbofish by Pistachio #41.
• Improving Doublephone by Jonathan Stowe.
• Does some cool stuff? by Pierce Darragh.
• Both with Perl 6 by Timo Paulssen.
• Aware of gradual typing by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt.
• On verbosity by Richard Smith.
• Not in Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• Tutorial on concurrency and evolutionary algorithms by JJ Merelo.
• More and more a dream language by Go statement considered harmful.
• And JIT compiled by Trang Le.
• Junctions are cool by Joelle Maslak.
• First language? by Shut up, Wesley.
• Variable length floating point by Jeff Goff.
• Unintended consequences by Carl Mäsak.
• Neural Network in Perl 6 by LeaderGPU GPUaaS.
• GSOC update by The Perl Shop.
• Engaging by Antonio Gomez Delgado.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Perl 6 actually exists? by Wendy van Dijk.
• Squashing bugs with bonus by Wendy van Dijk.
• Why you should mention “Perl 6 programming” by Wendy van Dijk.
• Thanks again! by Raymond Dresens.
• Real::Unum by Jeff Goff.
• s:g/68 Mathematica/71 Perl 6/ by Jeff Goff.

Perl 6 in comments

• Unrelated language by Dan Book.
• Far more influential by b2gills.
• Faster than C++ by b2gills.
• Not enough paradigms by b2gills.
• Not a zero-sum game by b2gills.
• Sporadic efforts by microtherion.
• From the googles by Ralph Mellor.
• Did not work on Perl 5 core by microtherion.
• On EVAL by Ralph Mellor.
• Extremely practical by dragonwriter.
• Nice MAIN example by xisukar.
• On static typing by Ralph Mellor.
• Two aspects by Ralph Mellor.
• Compelling reasons by b2gills.
• Two steps forward by Ralph Mellor.
• What if no alias by xisukar.
• On add and + by b2gills.
• Strangely consistent by b2gills.
• On gradual typing by Ralph Mellor.
• Not good enough by b2gills.
• Patronising and confrontational by spiralx.
• A real impact by Ralph Mellor.
• Excuses for sluggishness by cutler.
• Haz Nil by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Failable by Ben Davies.
• Date::Calendar::FrenchRevolutionary by Jean Forget.
• Matrix::Bot by Patrick Spek.

Updated modules:

• Term::Choose, Term::TablePrint, Term::Form by Matthäus Kiem.
• Archive::Libarchive by Fernando Santagata.
• OpenAPI::Schema::Validate, OpenAPI::Model by Jonathan Worthington.
• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• IO::Glob by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• ProcStats by Steven Lembark.
• App::MoarVM::ConfprogCompiler by Timo Paulssen.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.

Winding Down

Calling the past week uneventful, would be a euphemism (another blog post by yours truly, Reddit comments). Looking forward to a really uneventful week, so the Perl 6 Weekly will take a lot less time to read (and to write!).

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!

2019.26 PerlCon in Riga

The schedule for PerlCon in Riga on 6 – 9 August has been published (/r/perl, /r/perl6 comments). For those of you wanting to get to know more about Perl 6’s concurrency and parallel processing features: there are still seats available in Jonathan Worthington‘s Concurrency and Parallelism workshop on 6 August!

The PerlCon June Newsletter has also been published, asking attendees to make sure the organization knows about your T-shirt and food preferences, and to confirm your talk (if you are giving any) and to make sure that your accommodation is in order!

Ballad of Perl

Stephen Scaffidi has written a very nice Ballad of Perl. Sadly, there is no video of an actual performance of this ballad known 😦

More on Sorting

Andrew Shitov is sorting out his blog posts quite extensively. The crop of the past week:

• 103. Merge sort (Reddit comments).
• 104. Stooge sort.
• 105. Pancake sort.
• 106. Gnome sort (Reddit comments).
• 107. Odd-even sort.

Aaron Sherman got inspired by all of these to write about the sleep sort algorithm (Reddit comments).

Lack of List concatenation

Aaron Sherman also thought that Perl 6 is in need of a simple way to create a single flattened list out of two lists. He explains why and how in a blog post titled “Perl 6 needs a list concatenation op (Reddit comments) and supplied an ecosystem module Operator::Listcat as well!

Perl Weekly Challenge

Mohammad S Anwar has written an overview of the first 3 months of the Perl Weekly Challenge. He has also reacted to a blog post of Yuki Kimoto about the apparent lack of mentioning the benefits of Perl 5 in Perl Weekly Challenge results.

Damian Conway looked back on the previous Perl Weekly Challenge in a blog post titled “Simplicity made easy” (Hacker News, Reddit comments).

This week there were quite a few blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #14:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 14: Van Eck’s Sequence and US States by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Perl Weekly Challenge #014 by Athanasius (Reddit comments).
• Van Eck, US States and Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 14 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #15 is up for your perusal!

Squashathon time again!

Next Saturday (5-6-7 July) there will be another Squashathon, this time aimed at adding as many mathematical sequences as possible (Facebook comments). Anybody can join online. The most/best contributions will receive a plush Camelia!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week and the month of June.
• Daniel Green fixed a recent issue with the profiler.
• Timo Paulssen made rare errors that would expose MoarVM / NQP internals much less LTA, significantly helping in fixing them.
• Paweł Murias continued working on the Javascript backend.
• Ben Davies found a signature error in PsuedoStash.WHICH, then Jan-Olof Hendig found and fixed some more in other core multi methods.
• Will Coleda fixed the wording in some Test messages.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with colonpair processing.
• And some more improvements and fixes, still in anticipation of the 2019.06 release, being prepared by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev and Kane Valentine.

Questions about Perl 6

• Multi methods never match expected signature by Kane Valentine.
• Blocks on awaiting killed Proc::Async by cowbaymoo.
• Bit fields in NativeCall by tmtvl.
• Are subs really lexically scoped or have extra? by drclaw.
• Ways to get mutable strings from a Match object’s chunks? by wamiks.
• CONTROL or once messes with last? by JJ Merelo.
• If regexes are methods, which class they correspond to? by JJ Merelo.
• Declaring Arrays with Multiple Ranges by con.
• Calling Bool on a Regex does not work as documented by JJ Merelo.
• Dangling topic (or any other) variable does not fail by JJ Merelo.
• Something is wrong with handles by Aaron Sherman.
• Can * be used in sym tokens for more than one character? by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Wish Perl 6 had gone immutable by firebreathingduck.
• Interesting, grammars by kr1nu.
• Reducing cognitive load by Brad Gilbert.
• Recognizing Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• What is the fate? by Timothy Adigun.
• Curious comment by Barry Rowlingson.
• Usable for some time already by Patrick Böcker.
• How things are indexed in docs by Antonio Gomiz.
• Did a Perl 6 one by Dave Jacoby.
• Working on wide strings by Ben Davies.
• What happened recently? by 紅月さん@がんばらない.
• Never arrived by Timo Koola.
• Which HTTP::Client? by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Discord Moderation by Kane Valentine.
• Pass more than one value by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Christmas for npm by Yoshiya / ひのさわ / かた(肩).
• Why not “moreperl” by Mike Chamberlain.
• On CouchDB by Jonathan Stowe.
• It’s True by Jeff Goff.
• GSOC Hackathon by JJ Merelo.
• Freedom of the parent language by eater of cyber.
• Perl 6 version of … by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Please, hold my beer by John D. Cook.
• Butterfly by ヶ烙.
• Good to feel bad by ヶ烙.
• On breaking promises by Chris Sotherden.
• ANSI escapes on Windows by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Quotechimps by Dana Champions.
• Uncharacteristically quiet by Carl Mäsak.
• Simple passwordly by Paul Cochrane.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Perl 6 at linux.conf.au? by Norman Gaywood.

Perl 6 in comments

• Raising to meta level by ktpsns.
• On different slurpies by Ralph Mellor.
• Intensely meaningful by Ralph Mellor.
• On dropping sigils and keywords by Ralph Mellor.
• Showing the promise by Ralph Mellor.
• Where is the migration? by mey.
• Avoiding colouring by Ralph Mellor.
• No observables? by Ralph Mellor.
• A final multi by Ralph Mellor.
• Some Unicode operators by uryga.
• Only one to parse Devanagari by Ralph Mellor.
• Not using the bounce approach by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Operator::Listcat by Aaron Sherman.
• Podviewer by Luis F. Uceta.
• Pod::Utilities by Antonio Gomiz.

Updated modules:

• TCP::LowLevel, Net::BGP by Joelle Maslak.
• Type::EnumHOW by Ben Davies.
• KHPH by Mark Devine.
• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen.
• GTK::Glade, GTK::V3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Font::FreeType by David Warring.
• AccessorFacade by Jonathan Stowe.

Winding Down

Still in great anticipation of the 2019.06 release, this week brought again quite a nice number of blog posts and associated discussion. Looking forward to next weekend’s Squashathon as well! So see you next week for more Perl 6 news!

2019.25 On Toolsets

Damian Conway came out with another blog post about Perl 6 in the past week: Coding with an even fuller toolset, as a follow up on last week’s blog post about tooling. (/r/perl6 comments). It also started a thread on /r/perl. Some excellent reading material again. And there’s a lot more of that this week! But first some multimedia:

TPCiP Videos

All videos of The Perl Conference in Pittsburgh have been published. These presentations provide Perl 6 content:

• Perl Out Loud by Emily Shea.
• The Perl Family Tree: Discover Your Heritage by Will Braswell.
• What I learned on my vacation – Hacking FindBin::libs in Perl 6 by Steven Lembark.
• O(fun) in Perl 6 by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Q & A with Larry Wall by Jim Brandt.
• The State of the Scallion Address by Will Braswell.
• Memories of YAPC::NA 19100 by Walt Mankowski.
• A new name for Perl by Ingy döt Net (/r/perl, /r/perl6, Facebook comments).

Next year’s American Perl Conference will be in Houston!

Hello World!

Madeleine Goebel tells us that she got the Hello World proof-of-concept running in her GSOC project to create a single executable of a Perl 6 app! Exciting times!

Daily Posts Again

Andrew Shitov has picked up on his streak of daily blog posts again. In the past days he’s published:

• 100. Bubble sort in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).
• 101. Quick sort in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).
• 102. Insertion sort in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).

Looking forward to many of these in the future!

GSoC progress

Antonio Gamiz not only blogged once about his project in the past week, he blogged twice!

• GSoC 2019!
• First work report of GSoC!

Logic Programming

Jeff Goff not only did an excellent Perl 6 workshop in Pittsburgh, he also got inspired to write a blog post about logic programming, co-inspired by Picat (Facebook comments).

Summer slurpies, 3 for a $

Matthew ‘Matéu’ Stephen Stuckwisch also wrote an excellent blog post about Variadic functions in Perl 6, or in other words: how and when to use which slurpies (or not). Recommended reading!

Perl Weekly Challenge

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for the Perl Weekly Challenge #13:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 13: Fridays and Mutually Recursive Subroutines by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• The Perl Weekly Challenge 13 by Simon Proctor (Reddit comments).
• Hofstadter, Friday and Perl 6 by Arne Sommer (Reddit comments).
• Perl Weekly Challenge #013 by Athanasius.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 13 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #14 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Timo Paulssen continued his work on confprog, the configurable profiler. He also fixed an issue with Date/DateTime objects with specific formatters.
• Ben Davies fixed a memory leak when reading bytes from a socket.
• Jan-Olof Hendig fixed a problem recently introduced on 32-bit systems.
• Paweł Murias fixed an issue with wrapped Javascript functions (on the Javascript backend). And he added basic support for

  use Foo:from<node.js>;

  which should unlock all of node libraries to Perl 6 on the Javascript backend!

• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with List.reverse and with the use of Junctions in grep.
• Vadim Belman fixed a type checking issue with a role inheriting from a class. He also fixed a problem with additional containers in exported values.
• And some more improvements and fixes in anticipation of the 2019.06 release.

Questions about Perl 6

Finally at the 1111 mark in StackOverflow!

• Some code golf help requested by Aaron Sherman.
• Really binding an argument to a parameter? by ozzy.
• Is this a bug in list handling? by Aaron Sherman.
• Differences between .Bool, .so, ? and so by ozzy.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Perl 6, The Movie by Casey Dahlin.
• Is it … by Alexey Makhov.
• Mind blown by Simon Proctor.
• BER before Perl 6 by xwolf.
• Whatever tool by Simon Proctor.
• Inspiring? by Hans Ginzel.
• Fantastic, but… by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Modern IT Tech by Masataka Nakamura a.k.a La Ville Eternell.
• Production ready by firebreathingduck.
• Looking for something big by firebreathingduck.
• Not rails6 by くろねこ.
• When I hear Larry Wall by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.
• First class signatures by Brad Gilbert.
• Futures by Dawn S. Wallis.
• Favourite feature? by かるぱねるら.
• Perl 6, the Book by Steve Mynott.
• Getting useful by Chris Nandor.
• Immutable data types by ryn1x.
• First article by Antonio Gamiz.
• A moving appeal by myrrhlin.
• Touching Perl 6 by ポムポムプリン【ひかるん】.
• Working out quickly by ryn1x.
• Promises way back by Rebecca Turner.
• Ruby’s Dad by Atsushi Kajiro.
• Three out of five by JJ Merelo.
• Facts about contributions by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Like Perl6::Form by こりゃ（´Д`）まいったね.
• In esolang by こたつがめ.
• Searching Bing by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Weaponized by /dpt/.txt.
• Share her bio by CS for All Teachers.
• The same in Perl 6 by Jonathan Stowe.
• Thank you for the videos by Joelle Maslak.
• Tears of joy! by CristoContrerasRubio.
• To learn all the languages by Congreso esLibre.
• Insistently Perl 6 by CristoContrerasRubio.
• Discovering Perl 6 by Congreso esLibre.
• The why of Camelia by Congreso esLibre.
• Rocket man by Antonio.
• Picking a winner by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Many wonders by Antonio.
• Got a book! by Antonio.
• Example of pattern matching by Congreso esLibre.
• Fanmade logo by Jeff Goff.
• Just valid Perl 6 by EntranceJew (follow @ejew_in).
• Running quietly by Etaoin Shrdlu.
• PCD by Jeff Goff.
• Fat arrow and point blocks mashup by Jonathan Stowe.
• Renaming some exceptions by Jonathan Stowe.
• Don’t fail in tests, flunk! by Joelle Maslak.
• Released as TCP::LowLevel by Joelle Maslak.
• Hearing right? by 印度神.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Downloading documentation behavior by Parrot Raiser.

Perl 6 in comments

• Not one of the options by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Gradual typing: check by yellowapple.
• On continuations by Ralph Mellor.
• Shy away from Perl by UnityNorway.
• Raised an eyebrow by ktpsns.
• Multi prompt continuations by Ralph Mellor.
• Implicitly nullable by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• ProcStats by Steven Lembark.
• CI::Gen by Shlomi Fish.
• TCP::LowLevel by Joelle Maslak.
• Perl6::Documentable by Antonio Gamiz.

Updated modules:

• App::MoarVM::ConfprogCompiler by Timo Paulssen.
• Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.
• RPi::Device::SMBus, Audio::Silan, Lumberjack by Jonathan Stowe.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• KHPH by Mark Devine.
• Pod::Load by JJ Merelo.

Winding Down

While suffering from what will be this years first heatwave at yours trulies, it is good to see so many blog posts about Perl 6. While the final blockers for a 2019.06 Rakudo compiler release are being taken care of. See you again next week, hopefully a bit less hot!