Hillel Wayne published a blog post called “Raku: A Language for Gremlins – By Gremlins, For Gremlins™” in which they describe how they are at a loss of how to describe the Raku Programming Language, but would like it to succeed!

This caused quite a bit of chatter on the interwebs: /r/rakulang, /r/programming, HackerNews, Lobste.rs.

Probably inspired by the Gremlins blog post, the Wibble posted “Raku Language: The Saviour of Confused Programmers” perhaps not all that seriously (/r/rakulang comments).

Steve’s Corner

Steve Roe published two blog posts this week:

• The Variable Lifecycle
• Sunshine on Jupyter

Paweł’s Corner

Paweł bbkr Pabian continued their tutorial series about Unicode with:

• UTF-8 (de)composition (/r/rakulang comments)
• UTF-8 grapheme clusters

Elizabeth’s Corner

Elizabeth Mattijsen continued their 20+ part blog series about migrating Perl to Raku code with:

• Not So Obvious Semantic Changes (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 of 3)
• Containers Vs References
• Subroutine Signatures
• Sigils (Part 1, Part 2 of 2) (/r/rakulang comments)

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #230 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• “language versions” are a strawman; real code depends on the runtime

New Pull Requests

• Remove numeric comparison operators from DateTime
• Allow default CURIs to be disabled
• Change REPL recommendation order

Core Developments

• Nick Logan fixed NativeCall breaking if the RAKUDO_NO_PRECOMPILATION environment variable was set. Sadly, this broke all NativeCall tests on RakuAST.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed $*KERNEL.bits on ARM64 processors, made .min/.max 30% faster, .minmax 20% and .minpairs/.maxpairs about 10%. They also implemented :k, :v, :kv, :p adverbs on .min/.max, and the :k adverb on .sort.
• And some smaller fixes and tweaks.

And in RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen added syntax support for once blocks, and fixed an error in determining nameless objects.
• Some smaller fixes and tweaks.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 111/150 (make test -28) and 931/1358 (make spectest +14).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• A transducers library for Raku by Samuel Chase.
• A cron-like service by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Now uses Lumberjack by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Have read them all! by Paul Buetow.

Meanwhile still on Twitter 𝕏

• Using the usable parts by pmf.
• A routine within an array by Semiciclo de Trántor.
• If design were truly influential by Jube.
• Made intuitive sense by Luis F. Uceta.
• A separate repo for parsing data by JJ Merelo.

Questions about Raku

• Where is Peterson’s algorithm used in the real world? by Luis F. Uceta.
• How to add an attribute and its accessors using add_attribute()? by Fernando Santagata.
• The most production ready and maintained web development framework? by WishboneOK2901.
• Where do Raku folks congregate online? by Spirited-Chocolate14.
• Strange behavior when changing $*SCHEDULER after execution of external program by fingolfin.

Comments

• Leaping off the page by Ralph Mellor.
• On crossing the dynamic–static boundary by Ralph Mellor.
• Interesting timing by Ralph Mellor.
• As Rust and Raku have done by imiric.
• On versioning by Ralph Mellor.
• The evil nice twin by Ralph Mellor.
• Feeling good about the elegance by imiric.
• A bit overselling by justinclift.

New Raku Modules

• LendingClub “A wrapper for the Lending Club API” by James Carman.
• App:Racl “Raku calculator for the command line” by Steve Roe.
• MergeOrderedSeqs “Merge multiple ordered Seqs into a single ordered one” by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.

Updated Raku Modules

• Template6 by Márton Polgár.
• LLM::Functions, Text::SubParsers, ML::FindTextualAnswer, WWW::PaLM by Anton Antonov.
• P5math, P5opendir, DirHandle, Memoize, P5-X, P5chomp, P5chr, P5defined, P5fc, P5hex, P5lc, P5lcfirst, P5length, P5print, P5push, P5quotemeta, P5readlink, P5ref, P5reverse, P5shift, P5reset, P5pack, P5built-ins, List::MoreUtils, P5caller, P5getgrnam, P5getnetbyname, P5getprotobyname, P5getpwnam, P5getservbyname, P5localtime, P5unlink by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Physics::Measure, CLI::AWS::EC2-Simple, Physics::Unit by Steve Roe.
• Font::FreeType, Base64::Native by David Warring.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.
• Cooklang by Erik Johansen.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• Path::Finder by Leon Timmermans.

Winding down

Feels like 13 blog posts is a weekly record. And some nice exposure for the Raku Programming Language. Meanwhile, Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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

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