Some weeks just have sad news: And the saddest part about this, is that it wasn’t until this week to become known that Robert Lemmen has died in June 2020 already. Robert Lemmen mostly worked on Debian, in the Raku context specifically about packaging Raku on Debian. They also had a number of modules in the Raku ecosystem, and also blogged about them (The Surprising Sanity of Using a Cache but Not Updating It).

Contributors to open source projects regularly drop out of sight of the project, usually because they are too busy with other stuff. So it’s not uncommon to miss someone, but the general feeling is that they will return at some point. Alas, not so for Robert Lemmen. They will be missed.

Natural language principles

Daniel Sockwell re-read an old post by Larry Wall, which inspired them to start an interesting discussion about the natural language principles in Raku.

A Camel in the Room

The past week saw the publication of two articles in “mainstream” online media about events related to The Perl Foundation: TheRegister (HackerNews comments), ArsTechnica (HackerNews, /r/programming comments), which sadly also involved members of the Raku community (including yours truly). You should probably skip the comments.

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik only blogged once this week: Bird – Raku DSL for infrastructure testing.

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti re-iterated on previous blog posts this week:

• Think Bayes in Raku – Pmf class, take 2
• Think Bayes in Raku – Suite class, take 2

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel was inspired by a blog post by Flavio again: Inequality, about the difference between 1 and 1.0 in set operations (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #126 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• [JVM] let with/without use defined 

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark changed the stringification of floating point values from using the Grisu3 to using the Ryū algorithm on MoarVM.
• Daniel Green fixed a memory leak related to filenames of files to load MoarVM bytecode.
• Will Coleda updated the documentation of some nqp functions.
• raydiak fixed the rendering of nested para blocks in Pod::To::Text.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue with the precedence of let and temp.

A very quiet week indeed. Pretty sure this will pick up again after a lot of people have returned from vacation!

Questions about Raku

• Find out external command runability by uxer.
• Optimize without sacrificing usual workflow: arguments, POD etc by uxer.
• Is there a way to detect whether something is immutable? by Joseph Brenner.
• Junction ~~ Junction behavior by Paweł Pabian.
• Does the do keyword run a block or treat it as an expression? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Raku pop() order of execution by FyFAIR.
• What would Raku look like without any syntactic sugar? by kapitaali_com.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Not released today by Anis Shiekh.
• The bane of my existence by Julia.
• Upgrade RedX::HashedPassword by Jonathan Stowe.
• Did not disappoint by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• All First Raku Conference videos now published by Andrew Shitov.
• 17+ hours of video by Andrew Shitov.
• Ethereum presentation live! by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Aspect oriented programming presentation live! by JJ Merelo.
• One line stood out by Dr. Roy Schestowitz.
• Fewer breaking changes you can make by Jordan Rose.
• Disappointed by Paul Cochrane.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Callbacks with placeholder vars by Joseph Brenner.
• Re: Depreciated code???? by Will Coleda.

Comments about Raku

• Really enjoy these! by nonodaddyo.
• What is Raku mainly used for? on /r/rakulang.
• I think Raku allows that by dash2.
• Beaten into beautiful consistency by guifa.
• Free to innovate by eyepopslikeamosquito.
• A sore spot by fedward.
• Time to do an article by guifa.
• Recursively in Raku by Daniel Sockwell.

New Raku Modules

• taurus Taurus parses Call logs by Andinus.

Updated Raku Modules

• Intl::Format::Unit by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Sparrow6, bird by Alexey Melezhik.
• Text::CodeProcessing by Anton Antonov.
• URI, CSS::Properties by David Warring.
• App::IRC::Log by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Algorithm::XGBoost by Itsuki Toyota.
• Crypt::AnyPasswordHash, EventSource::Server, License::SPDX, META6, RedX::HashedPassword by Jonathan Stowe.
• TAP by Leon Timmermans.
• BSON by Marcel Timmerman.
• Matrix::Client by Matias Linares.
• BTree, Tree::Binary by Simon Proctor.
• Overwatch by Tony O’Dell.
• Term::Choose, Term::Choose::Util, Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding down

Vacation time with a lot of emotional churn. Remain careful and vigilant, also during your vacation, and when back from vacation! This pandemic is far from over yet! See you all next week, hopefully in good health!