In IEEE Spectrum’s ninth annual ranking of Top Programming Languages, the Raku Programming Language comes in at #50 when weighted by trending (/r/rakulang comments)! A good trend!

Day 1 of videos

The videos of the first day of the Raku Conference 2022 have become available:

• The good, the bad, and the butterfly — my first year with Raku by Márton Polgár.
• Implementation of ML algorithms in Raku by Anton Antonov.
• Tools for making your scripts more user friendly by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A couple of new modules for database migrations and testing in Raku by Jonathan Worthington.
• Red, an ORM for Raku by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Retro Cool Raku by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Be smart – be lazy! Provided to you by AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Make a module for you and others: creation and submission to Fez by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• Tomtit — Raku Task Runner by Alexey Melezhik.

The videos of Day 2 will become available soon.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer looked at the difference between using once and assuming in Assuming optionality.

my $seq = (^5).map: * + 1;  # store Seq unreified in a scalar

$seq = $seq.map: * ** 2 if Bool.pick;  # 50% chance of change

say $seq;  # (1 2 3 4 5) or (1 4 9 16 25)

Of course, this isn’t actually modifying an existing Seq object, but rather creating a new Seq object with the original Seq object wrapped in it. But you could think about it like that 🙂

This feature is used extensively to handle the 100+ options that can be specified with rak.

Check out the “did you know” registry, started by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer. Suggestions as Pull Requests welcome!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #181 is available for your perusal.

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert optimized the handling of BEGIN blocks in MoarVM.
• yabobay made a warning (about using .contains incorrectly) clearer.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced two new features in 6.e: // foo as shorthand for foo.defined, and a snitch method / sub to more easily debug intermediate results in a chain of method calls / feed operators.

Questions about Raku

• How to get paths for apps showing in “App Paths” folder in Windows Registry using windows API? by Steve Dondley.
• Inconsistent behavior of map function with Empty value in Supply and plain Array? by chenyf.
• How to implement Python’s digest function in Raku? by chenyf.
• NativeCall to Windows API function RegEnumKeyExW resulting in inconsistent and incomplete output by Steve Dondley.
• How do I generate a handle for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE? by Steve Dondley.
• Why does BUILD not see attribute from parent class? by Pawel Pabian.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Fastspec in parallel by Alexey Melezhik.
• Not bound to ASCII by Massa Humberto.
• Something like this by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Comma Complete++ by Oleksandr Kyriukhin.
• Data::Record news by Ben Davies.
• Red to use by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Not been possible by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Be an articleist! by JJ Merelo.
• Day One Videos by Andrew Shitov.
• From a proposal by Tim Cheadle.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• detach? by ToddAndMargo.
• Re: BEGIN {} question by Richard Hainsworth.
• sprintf and print question by ToddAndMargo.
• Steps of a path by Marc Chantreux.

Comments about Raku

• Calling things by old names by Qem.
• More like throwing an exception by flussence.
• The next 50 on TIOBE.
• Implicit (de)referencing by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Pod::Usage “extracts POD documentation to show usage information” by Leon Timmermans.
• IO::Stem “Provides the part of an IO.basename left with the IO.extension removed” by Tom Browder.
• Geo::WellKnownBinary “Convert WellKnownBinary to Geo::Geometry objects” by Kevin Pye.
• Geo::WellKnownText “Convert Well Known Text to Geo::Geometry objects” by Kevin Pye.
• Math::Angle “A class to handle geometric angles” by Kevin Pye.

Updated Raku Modules

• CSS::Module, CSS::Properties, PDF::Class by David Warring.
• rak, highlighter, Git::Blame::File, App::Browser, highlighter, App::Rak by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Cromtit, Sparky-Job-Api by Alexey Melezhik.
• API::Discord by shuppet.
• Test::Output by Steve Dondley.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Path::Finder,TAP, App::Prove6, Getopt::Long by Leon Timmermans.
• Data::Reshapers, DSL::English::DataQueryWorkflows by Anton Antonov.
• Data::Record by Ben Davies.
• RakuConfig, Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• Terminal::Getpass, Algorithm::LibSVM by Itsuki Toyota.
• Definitely by Kay Rhodes.
• UpRooted by Pawel Pabian.
• Jupyter::Kernel by Brian Duggan.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• HTML::Tag by Márton Polgár.

Winding down

Again, some exciting new modules! And a new Comma version with support for new templating features!

This week’s image was again not made by yours truly, but it is there to remind us of the fragility of Ukraine in their and our fight against the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

In the meantime, please stay safe, stay healthy, keep up the good work!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!