Want to quickly learn about the fundamentals of Raku with a book? Raku Fundamentals by Moritz Lenz has just arrived on the physical bookshelves as well as on the virtual ones. Formerly known as “Perl 6 Fundamentals”, the second edition has been completely updated and has a chapter on Cro web services added. Be sure to leave a review when you have become the owner of a copy!

Introduction Videos

Out of the blue, a very nice set of introductory videos into the Raku Programming Language have appeared on the interwebs. Kudos to Alex Merced for making these, and William Michels for the tip!

Steering Council Election

You have until midnight UTC on 20 September 2020 to cast your vote in the first official Raku Steering Council election. Fourteen candidates to fill 7 positions: and here they are in alphabetical order of their last name (follow the link to find out why they would like to be on the RSC):

• Vadim Belman (@vrurg)
• Brian Duggan (@bduggan)
• Richard Hainsworth (@finanalyst)
• Nigel Hamilton (@nige123)
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev (@AlexDaniel)
• Nick Logan (@ugexe)
• Elizabeth Mattijsen (@lizmat)
• Alexey Melezhik (@melezhik)
• Juan-Julián Merelo-Guervós (@JJ)
• William Michels (@jubilatious1)
• Stefan Seifert (@niner)
• Daniel Sockwell (@codesections)
• Patrick Spek (@tyil)
• Jonathan Worthington (@jnthn)

Please follow the instructions on how to cast your ballot!

Give Peas A Chance

Daniel Sockwell elaborates about how the difference between pod and pod6, is like the difference between JSON and Javascript objects. In Peas in a Pod6 (/r/rakulang comments).

Errors International

L’Alabameñu has started a project to translate Raku’s error messages into various natural languages other than English. The associated module is not (yet) in the module ecosystem, but feels interesting enough to start mentioning already 🙂

Weekly Suspects

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer wrote about releasing on Github, and Andrew Shitov revisited weekly challenges of the past with an interesting range of alternate programming languages.

Weekly Meetings

For quite a few months now, Joseph Brenner has been running a weekly Raku Study Group in San Francisco. Sadly, yours truly had not noticed that these events have been online, so you don’t actually have to travel to San Francisco to be able to attend. So be sure to checkout the upcoming events for details on the next meeting!

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #78 is available for your perusal, and Andrew Shitov was quick to follow that up with their solutions and found time to do a full review of the Raku solutions of Challenge #76.

Core Developments

Most of the core developments have been happening in branches on MoarVM and Rakudo, specifically in the rakuast branch. Meanwhile, in the main branch:

• Patrick Böker fixed a problem with writing profile files on relocatable builds of Rakudo in the main branch.
• Alexander Kiryuhin updated a helper script for doing Rakudo releases that was originally developed by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Sparc64 support
• Convert MVMSpeshCandidate to a REPR
• Decamelify easter eggs
• Fix --rakudo-home Configure.pl parameter

Please check them out and leave any comments that you may have!

Questions about Raku

• Why is the (very cool!) Podlite editor written in TypeScript instead? by Daniel Sockwell.
• What’s up with Rakudo Star releases, especially for MacOS? by zeekar.
• Looks like Raku has virtually all of Lisp’s advantages by Daniel Sockwell.
• Rearrange a number into non-English alphabetical order by Lars Malmsteen.
• Enum question by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Can’t figure out what is wrong with this code by CDwom.
• Is Raku slow? by Andrew Shitov.
• Multi subroutine recursive by anquegi.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Run ddt as a Raku function by Alexey Melezhik.
• New Hash implementation by Stéphane Peyrard.
• Raku in Jeopardy! by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Don’t go too deep by Andrew Shitov.
• A repository of automation tools by Alexey Melezhik.
• A coronavirus dashboard by Paul McLeod.
• New module: DISKUsage by Ramiro Encinas.
• Learned nothing by (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻.
• Don’t know what they’re missing by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A FizzBuzz for KevlinHenney by Markus Holzer.
• Also programmer of Raku by JJ Merelo.
• raku-utils-pod-weave by Alexey Melezhik.
• Plugin for Linux::Fuser by Alexey Melezhik.
• A good infrastructure of user stories by JJ Merelo.
• Due to be released any day now by James Cuff.
• More versatile by k-motoyan.
• Different algorithms by Andrew Shitov.
• Would you use it for that? by Thomas Rodgers.
• Let’s hear about the future by salexkidd.
• You can vote! by JJ Merelo.
• Really cool things! by Andrew Shitov.
• Show memory usage by Alexey Melezhik.
• Show disk usage by Alexey Melezhik.
• Short and Fast by Markus Holzer.
• ⅓ < 30 by JJ Merelo.
• Updating memory by Cody.
• Got three answers! by Julia ☕️.
• Where did you hear about it answers by JJ Merelo.
• How to make me hate your language by Ken Hates Software.
• Four out of Five versus One in Twenty by JJ Merelo.
• Code examples in academia by kinaba.

Comments about Raku

• Generally leaving us alone by Ralph Mellor.
• The same feature by moonchild.
• Pretty much normal code by Ralph Mellor.
• New hash implementation? by Ralph Mellor.
• Desirable vs undesirable by Merijn H. Brandt.
• Replace $_ by * by Ralph Mellor.
• Will a dynamically typed language eventually need optional static typing? by jesseschalken.
• Basic problem to solve by Ralph Mellor.
• Too different by josefx.
• My focus is… by Ralph Mellor.
• Eliminate confusion by Wowfunhappy.
• A pragma for unicode by theonemind.

New Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::DigitalFiltering by Fernando Santagata.
• Math::Roman by Itsuki Toyota.
• Hyperscript by Jack Miles.
• BigRoot by Julio.
• Acme::OwO by Kane Valentine.
• System::Stats::DISKUsage by Ramiro Encinas.

Updated Raku Modules

• Pod::Literate by Daniel Sockwell.
• Font::FreeType, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Matrix::Client by Matias Linares.
• Router::Right by Konstantin Narkhov.

Winding down

A new book, some new videos, new modules, new blog posts and many people talking about Raku. A quiet week again, indeed :-). Please, don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. Check again next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language!