Out of the blue Felix Knorr has written a very nice blog post about how the Raku Programming Language is pretty damn cool for them, describing Raku as a language that mixes Bash and Python (/r/rakulang, HackerNews, lobste.rs comments).

Vadim’s Corner

Vadim Belman updated their extensive blog post about Raku’s Metamodel Archetypes, which should probably make it to some kind of tutorial in the documentation!

Luis’ Corner

Luis F. Uceta wrote an extensive blog post about their quest to parse an old-stype dBASE data file using the Raku Programming Language: it’s like solving a puzzle!

On Zulip

Siavash Askari Nasr ensured a Raku Programming Language presence on Zulip, an open-source team communication platform.

On Exercism

Mienaikage reports that there are now more than 60 Raku exercises on Exercism! Sadly, it appears some have disappeared since then (last count seen: 59)!

Raku Steering Council

The minutes of the meeting of 24 June have been published, with some exciting decisions regarding the RakuDoc approval process!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #223 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Are Captures value types or not?
• Rakudoc in third-party modules and some related topics

New Pull Requests

• Use nqp::handle instead of try
• Make Capture an object type
• Add support for RAKUDO_NO_PRECOMPILATION environment variable
• Respect CUPR.may-precomp() in CURI

Core Developments

• Nick Logan continued optimizing module loading and installation.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced a Format class that takes an sprintf format string and returns string-like object that can be called with arguments to process that format string, made sure the .fmt method accepts Format objects as format specifications and added the “rakuast” tag for (de-) selecting in “make spectest”.
• Daniel Green provided a micro-optimization in the module loading process.

And in RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced a new o / format quote string adverb, to convert the given string to a Format object (e.g. q:o/%5s/ or q:format/%5s/), and fixed some small RakuDoc issues.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 140/150 (make test) and 884/1356 (make spectest +2).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• New unicode sigils by Solomon Foster.
• No confusion allowed by Tirifto.
• Isn’t that….? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Shaped by all kinds of visions and ideas by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Simply priming by Simon Proctor.

Meanwhile still on Twitter

• No, it doesn’t! by JJ Merelo.
• What did I miss? by Khalid Borai.
• First Raku PI by Jonathan Stowe.
• Writing about it in the process by Luis F. Uceta.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Is this a regex bug? by ToddAndMargo.
• Raku’s =finish takes place of Perl’s __DATA__ by William Michels.
• Tip: my keeper example of qqx and match by ToddAndMargo.

Questions about Raku

• What’s the difference between a Hashray and a Capture? by Ralph Mellor.
• How does lazy evaluation work on lists? by Luis F. Uceta.

Comments

• Safe navigation in Raku? by Kang-min Liu.
• Programming Language Fundamentals Review by stoicJB.
• One of the supported backends by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A permanent schism by eesmith.
• An experimental CLR implementation by Toby Inkster.

New Raku Modules

• EBNF::Grammar “Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) parsing and interpretation” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• Raku::Pod::Render, Collection by Richard Hainsworth.
• Template::Nest::XS by Frode Marton Meling.
• AlgorithmsIT by Tom Browder.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• LibXML, Font::FreeType by David Warring.
• FunctionalParsers by Anton Antonov.
• Terminal::Print, Terminal::Widgets by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• ML::AssociationRuleLearning, ML::Clustering, WWW::PaLM by Anton Antonov.

Winding down

That was a very nice surprise! And some cool core developments and intentions, with this week’s image captured from Spotify. Meanwhile, the popcorn goes back into the cupboard for now. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

Please keep staying safe, keep staying healthy, and keep up the good work!

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