FOSDEM 2026 Feedback

This year’s FOSDEM is something new. I think it’s the first time in the history of our Perl/Raku booth there when the whole ULB campus is filled with Perl and Raku posters. Not to mention the booth is located right at the entrance of the K building, and people are gathering around there asking questions about Raku (well, and Perl too 🙂). Really great work of those who made this possible

says roving reporter Andrew Shitov, see Facebook for more (sorry)

Periodic Table of the Operators

Thanks to a sterling initiative by Marc Lentczner, an updated version of the Raku Periodic Table of the Operators is now available for your perusal. Print copies were on sale at Fosdem and proceeds of the sale have been generously donated by Marc to The Perl and Raku Foundation (any errors were a joint effort between Marc and yours truly).

Problem Solving Issues v2.0

The next meeting will be held at 7 February 2026 at 19:00 UTC (20:00 CET, 14:00 EST, 11:00 PST, 04:00 JST (18 Jan)), and again at a one hour maximum. If not all of these issues have been resolved, they will be moved to a future meeting.

Since Jitsi worked out ok for this meeting, the next one will be held at the same URL: https://meet.jit.si/SpecificRosesEstablishAllegedly.

The reason Jitsi was selected, is that it has proven to be working with minimal hassle for at least the Raku Steering Council meetings. As the only thing you need to be able to attend, is a modern browser, a camera, and a microphone. No further installation required.

The remaining issues that will be discussed, are:
Separate Community Resource pages
Function return types should also tell about the used assignment/container
Raku Classification System
What makes unit be too late?

Collect, Conserve and Remaster Project

The CCR project now provides direct access to remastered CCR blog posts.

Liz’s Corner

This week, Elizabeth Mattijsen (lizmat) has blasted out post five in her series on WHY RAKU GETS SHOUTY SOMETIMES:

1. Cases of UPPER
2. INIT to an END
3. Hello, Goodbye
4. First Next, then Last
5. Last Close, and Quitting

Jnthn’s Corner

Jonathan Worthington gets a (belated) mention for his work on the Comma IDE. The modern way to do this btw is the Raku IntelliJ Plugin (RIP) by ab5tract.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #359 is available for your enjoyment.

Raku Tips ‘n Tricks

This week, jubilatious1, habere-et-dispere and rcmlz thrashed this one out. I think of it as a neat way to pick the local maxima from a list of numbers.

Since jubilatious1 likes a raku one-liner, here is their final cut:

~ > raku -e ‘my @a = (1,2,3,1,2,3).rotor(3 => -2); say $_, .map( * < * > * ) for @a;’
(1 2 3)(False)
(2 3 1)(True)
(3 1 2)(False)
(1 2 3)(False)

There is a lot going on in a small package, here is a blow by blow account:

my @a = (1,2,3,1,2,3)
.rotor(3 => -2);            #chop @a into 3-elem sublists, step back 2 each time

say $_,                     #print the topic (ie the current value of @a), and the result of the map 
.map( * < * > * )           #whatever * consumes all three elems of the sublist and checks if maximum 
for @a;                     #use the postfix form of `for` (braces are optional)

Which also serves to illustrate how flexible Raku code layout can be with helper constructs such as the postfix form to accommodate various coding paradigms, in this case a one-liners can easily be morphed to a more self explanatory script.

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

Core Developments

Extracted from the latest Draft Changelog.

Comments About Raku

• Very technically, I could write an NQP-to-native compiler by MostAwesomeDude
• Obviously, an LLM generated repository. (Which makes sense, BTW.) by antononcube

Meantime on The Socials

• FOSDEM was awesome as always! by Salve J. Nilsen
• escrever algoritmos básicos de IA … numa linguagem chamada Raku by zabumbista

New Raku Modules

• MCP by Waclaw Kusnierczyk
• App::ByWord by Fernando Correa de Oliveira

Updated Raku Modules

• Terminal::UI, App::samaki by Brian Duggan
• LLM::RetrievalAugmentedGeneration by Anton Antonov
• PDF::Class, LibXML by David Warring
• App::Workflows::Github by zero-overhead
• Chess by grondilu
• Air by Steve Roe
• Terminal::Capabilities, Terminal::Tests by Geoffrey Broadwell

Winding down

Big thanks to all the team for organising and supporting FOSDEM 2026.

I very much enjoyed working with Marc and Liz to bring the Raku Periodic Table of the Operators up to date. While, philosophically, I can understand the appeal of a small, constrained programming language (easy to learn, only one “right” way to do something), my brain was trained on the elaborate, complex, joyful mess that is English and this task reminded me that Raku is just rammed full of great ideas to help us just express our code in a way that best reveals the intent.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 53 of hopefully only 209.

~librasteve