On Saturday 14 March, it became known that our well-loved Jeff has died in a snorkelling accident during or shortly after the JoCoCruise 2020. The Perl and Raku communities learned a lot from Jeff Goff, from his many areas of interest: Mathematics, programming, making music, glass blowing, game playing, origami, taking care of parrots, Parrot, terrible movies and food, to name but a few. Or just from hanging out with the stories he would tell.

At the last FOSDEM, while taking care of the Perl and Raku booth, Jeff was telling everybody how he was looking forward to do some more snorkelling and scuba diving. Something he had developed a taste for in the past year. Snorkelling and scuba diving appeared to have been one of the few physical activities he could enjoy without being confronted by the quirks of his body. We can all take solace in the fact that he died while doing something he thoroughly enjoyed.

Jeff‘s family has asked to please not to contact them at this time, as much is still uncertain. We’re all waiting for more information. If you want to send condolences to the family, please do so to the following address:

     c/o Family Goff
     PO Box 118
     St. Ignatius, MT 59865
     USA

Some links: Wendy‘s memorial picture album. Memories by the community: Twitter, FB Raku group, Wendy’s FB post, /r/perl, /r/rakulang, Hacker News, Weekly Challenge, PerlMonks. He will be sorely missed.

The missing GPaRW video

Having cleared the administrative hurdles, the video of the Cro Router Essentials presentation by Jonathan Worthington at the German Perl and Raku Workshop has become available for viewing.

Conference Developments

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 related developments, the DC-Baltimore Perlyglot Workshop (18/19 April) has been cancelled. The Perl and Raku Conference 2020 in Houston (23-27 June) and Perl & Raku Con in Amsterdam 2020 (10-14 August) are still going ahead as planned.

Development Grant Report

Jonathan Worthington also reported about the work that’s been done with the development grant of The Perl Foundation in February 2020.

Grant Suggestions

The Perl Foundation has revived the page for suggestions for development grants. Want to make sure your idea for a grant does not get forgotten? Add an Issue, or even better a Pull Request, to its Github repository. Or even better still, submit a grant request!

A different COVID-19 perspective

Andrew Shitov shows a different perspective on the development of the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the world, written in the Raku Programming Language (/r/rakulang, HackerNews, Twitter comments). While doing so, Andrew found some interesting syntax sweets in Raku.

More of Andrew’s Goodies

Andrew Shitov also re-published a bunch of interviews from about five years ago (/r/rakulang comments). And Chapter 4: A Better Interpreter from the upcoming Creating a Compiler with Raku book.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #51:

• Colourful numbers and triplet by Luca Ferrari.
• Three Colours by Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Sums by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #51 by Javier Luque.
• 3 Sum and Colourful Numbers by Ryan J. Thompson.
• Weekly Challenge #51 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Weekly Challenge #51 by Mohammad S Anwar.

Challenge #52 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Jan-Olof Hendig has upgraded MoarVM to libuv 1.35.0.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen continued their work on streamlining (pre)compilation. They also made the Date/DateTime.yyyy-mm-dd method about 250x faster and added an optional separator parameter. And introduced similar dd-mm-yyy and mm-dd-yyyy methods, to cover the most common date stringifications. They also made IO::Path.mode about 14x as fast.
• Vadim Belman made sure that perl6 script aliases are created again, to fix problems that showed up in toolchains that are have not been converted to handle raku yet.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a problem with the signal(SIGINT) Supply that claimed sanity when it was only serialized. They also improved efficiency on the is copy Parameter trait.
• Ben Davies made Test‘s cmp-ok work with objects that do not actually support having methods. They also made using the handles Attribute trait up to 13% faster.
• And a few smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• How to get current line number during raku -n iteration? by Pawel Pabian bbkr.
• Trying to recast $*ARGFILES by JJ Merelo.
• How to kill a thread, stop a promise execution by tinmarino.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Remain ASCII accessible by Jordi Boggiano.
• Before yours by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Worried by みなと minato@麻雀,ボドゲ,音楽.
• Magical code by Mohammad S Anwar.
• != versus !== by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Looking good! by Alexey Melezhik.
• SparrowHub running on Cro by Alexey Melezhik.
• Was a programming language by TANOSHI（c98 二日目.
• Feline attention by Jack Merlot * 71 Sextillion Dollars.
• Old Myths by Damiane L’Heureux.
• Learning while contributing by Dino Morelli.
• What Raku plugins would you like? by Alexey Melezhik.
• Not yet released by 0, 70🤪*.
• Grant ideas? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Interested in learning by pantsman.
• Damian in Lausanne? by MaMo.
• More power to sanitize by Ben Davies.
• Rapid data analysis by The Perl Shop.
• Raku on Android by オペアンプbot.
• On META6.json by Suman Khanal🇳🇵.

Comments about Raku

• Wrong URL by Ralph Mellor.
• Using type hierarchies and generic methods by codr7.
• Quantum Crash Course by Ralph Mellor.
• On Smart Match by ojosilva.
• On the complexity waterbed by Ralph Mellor.
• Dogfooding by 7thaccount.

Updated Raku Modules

• P5caller, ObjectCache by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• POSIX::getaddrinfo by Mark Devine.
• Lumberjack by Jonathan Stowe.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix, Math::Libgsl::Constants by Fernando Santagata.
• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding down

We live in interesting times, indeed. In an age where people’s way of life will be severely affected for weeks, probably months, if not years to come, we are also saddened by the loss of a co-contributor, co-organizer, and friend. Nonetheless, there will be a Rakudo Weekly News again next week, so please check us out then!