Kudos to the Core Dev team for the release of 2025.12 in time for Christmas (more on this in the next issue) and many thanks to all the wonderful posts in this year’s Raku Advent. A few more to come.

Steve’s Corner

How many grug devs woke up this morning and thought “today I need an expressive, multi‑paradigm, Open Source language that works the way I think”?

I have a goal for 2026: – “interest & engage the next 1000 Raku coders”. My thesis is, we need to pool our resources and focus on a small number (1?) of exemplar applications that can be a showcase for our fantastic language.

Note: This motto came out of a long discussion and I 100% support it as the best way to describe Raku as a general purpose programming language…. nevertheless I do not think that we will achieve the goal unless we take our story out there and show how it solves a real problem to a group of devs.

The results of my recent ad hoc Reddit Poll are in:

Initial thoughts:

• Overall response was pretty meh – 12 votes from 760 views ;-(
• LLM did worse than I thought (even though I voted for it!), and DSLs better
• DSLs is the clear winner in this self selected sample of insiders
• Thanks to Melezhik for proposing automation, devops and config mgmt

I think this is telling us that if we are to be successful getting the next 1000 Raku converts in 2026, we need to do much more to present the case for DSLs (the why?) and the strengths of Raku Grammars (the how?) to a wider audience. The sceptic in me asks ‘how many devs out there wake up thinking: “I need a DSL to solve my problem, what’s the best way to do that?”‘. The optimist says (i) there must be a fair few, (ii) we can work on code and docs that show how Raku is a solution to that need, (iii) could well be a few thousand devs per year doing mini DSLs (and we only need 1000, eh?) and (iv) this is a well defined subset of devs where Raku has a clear, compelling, distinctive advantage.

Both LLMs and IaC (Infrastructure as Code) are large aspects of DSL tooling in general and we are fortunate to have both these key components in good shape.

Please bear in mind that this is a deliberate narrowing of the messaging of Raku to concentrate on a beachhead application, where Raku has clear and compelling distinctive advantages. This is a choice to not focus on the other applications, but in the words of Scott McNealy “put all the wood behind one arrow”.

Always thankful to the wisdom of the community. I have opened a Problem Solving Issue for us all to discuss and hopefully to achieve consensus on a plan.

FOSDEM Corner

Congrats to the TPRF FOSDEM organisers for securing a Raku stand at the forthcoming event.

We are trying to line up a Perl and Raku community dinner on the Saturday night (watch this space).

The call has gone out for ideas on a staff T-shirt (awarded to all who come and help the effort to explain Raku to the wider open source community). Right now the leading contender is this code snippet:

# no floating point error
say 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3;           # True

Your thoughts and ideas (and artwork?) are welcome for alternative designs… just PM me on IRC / Discord.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #353 is available for your enjoyment.

Raku Tips ‘n Tricks

This week, I thought I would try converting the Ruby “array math” code example to Raku:

# Raku knows what you
# mean, even if you
# want to do math on
# an entire Array
my @cities  = <London
 Oslo
 Paris
 Amsterdam
 Berlin>;
my @visited = <Berlin Oslo>;

say "I still need "
  ~ "to visit the "
  ~ "following cities: " 
  ~ (@cities (-) @visited)

# use this instead to
# preserve the order
#, (@cities (-) @visited){@cities}:k

Note the use of ~ to stringify in the first option. Kudos to Elizabeth Mattijsen for showing the cool way to reuse the @cities Array as a slice index on the QuantHash. Checkout the use of :k as an index adverb in the docs to see how this works.

Your contribution is welcome, please make a gist and share via the raku channel IRC or Discord.

Questions About Raku

• Too many positionals passed error with slurpy hash by JustThisGuy
• Need csvuniq functionality on the command line for CSV with embedded end of line by malat

Comments About Raku

• Zig+Raku is really a dream team when you need performance by leobm
• kept being amazed at some of the great things Raku does by tempaccsoz5
• I am always saying how good Raku’s imitation of Ruby is by Steve Roe

Updated Raku Modules

• Chess by github:grondilu
• GnomeTools by Marcel Timmerman
• CodeUnit, REPL by Elizabeth Mattijsen
• PDF::API6 by David Warring
• AI::Gator, App::samaki, Pod::To::Raku, Draku by Brian Duggan
• Anolis, Terminal-Widgets-Plugins-Anolis by Patrick Böker
• Sparky, Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik
• Graph, Math::NumberTheory by Anton Antonov
• Pheix by knarkhov
• L10N::AF by habere-et-dispertire

Winding down

I have pretty much said my piece at the top here. Please do feel free to help shape up these ideas for 2026. They are just that – ideas – all feedback very welcome!

Wishing all the best to readers for the holidays – hope you get a chance to relax and recharge.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 48 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

~librasteve