An announcement by the board of The Perl Foundation caused quite a bit of confusion (PerlWeekly, HackerNews comments), both in the Perl and Raku communities. Elizabeth Mattijsen explained that it was the wording of the announcement causing confusion. It’s the underlying legal entity “Yet Another Society” that will get another trade name (doing-business-as) “The Perl and Raku Foundation” (TPRF). Along with the other dbas “The Perl Foundation” and “The Raku Foundation”.

Mini-Grants for FOSDEM

Almost drowned out in the announcement, was the offer of TPRF to provide grants of 300 US$ to anybody who is accepted to give a Perl / Raku presentation in any of the devrooms at FOSDEM 2023 (4-5 February, Brussels, Belgium).

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik blogged about the DSL of SparrowCI in “DSL is dead, long live DSL!“

Elizabeth’s Corner

Elizabeth Mattijsen was on a roll this week, with 3 instalments in the “Don’t fear the grepper! series:

• Part 3: introducing the topic variable
• Part 4: using .map as .grep (/r/rakulang comments)
• Part 5: next/last and how for is just .map really

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov has published a re-recording on Youtube of a presentation given at the Wolfram Technology Conference called Simplified Machine Learning Workflows Overview (Raku-centric).

Tom’s Corner

Tom Browder introduced themselves in their first blog post on dev.to, called Pitching Raku!

Steering Council

The minutes of the October 29th, 2022 meeting are available.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #189 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• What to do with https://twitter.com/raku_news ?

New Pull Requests

• Add chown op
• [JVM] Fix defaults for typed optional @/% params

Core Developments

• Daniel Green added a chown op in MoarVM.
• Ben Davies implemented a cheaper bytecode (de)serialization algorithm on the JVM backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced a rotor-like capability to Str.comb in 6.e, making it much easier / more efficient (7.5x as fast) to produce n-grams from strings.
• Stefan Seifert continued working on the RakuAST branch, allowing native / custom array types to be used as attributes, upping number of passing test-files to 536/1354 (+4) and 68/131 (+3).

Questions about Raku

• Is there a function/method that would allow a sorted hash array to be iterated upon and determine its biggest value? by Homerian.
• Need help on assignment by Snehal26.
• Why aren’t variables interpolated in constant declarations? by Jim Bollinger.
• Why doesn’t utf8-c8 encoding work when reading filehandles by Robin A. Meade.
• Wanted: pkg symbolic by jj_ya.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A hare pipeline by Alexey Melezhik.
• No. But. Yeah. But. by Massa Humberto.
• Promptly by Massa Humberto.
• On becoming batter by # 5,014,590,418.
• 0.2 of rak by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Much simpler by Paul Cochrane.
• Artsy AI by AI Pirate Apes.
• Count and divide by Ralph Mellor.
• Multi-version pipeline Alexey Melezhik.
• On finding some work buy Semyon Slepov.
• No need for side-effects by Massa Humberto.
• The message by Massa Humberto.
• A distributed work queue, please! by Jonathan Stowe.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• How do I do a literal string in the target of a regex? by ToddAndMargo.
• How to I pick out items in the middle? by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Looks nice by Beltalowda.
• Raku appears in graph by Maika Möbus.
• Misreading rules by HortenseAndI.

Updated Raku Modules

• File::Which by Ahmad M. Zawawi.
• Lingua::EN::Sentence by Kim Ryan.
• Random::Choice by Itsuki Toyota.
• Sparky-Job-Api, Sparrowdo, Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• IRC::Client, highlighter, App::Rak by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Text::Utils, CSV-AutoClass by Tom Browder.
• Git::File::History by JJ Merelo.
• Lingua::NumericWordForms, Markdown::Grammar by Anton Antonov.
• Raku::Pod::Render, raku-pod-extraction, Collection, Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• Timezones::ZoneInfo by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• Font::FreeType, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brand.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.

Winding down

Quite a few blog posts this week, sorry 🙂

This week’s picture again shows that parts of the Netherlands are hilly enough to make clouds touch the ground, reminding us of the beauty of Ukraine, still fighting the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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

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