The Perl Weekly Challenge has generated quite a few submissions and associated blog posts (and of course the repository with submitted solutions). There’s now also a recap of the first challenge by Mohammad S Anwar. Keeping track of all the blog posts has become quite a job. Hopefully yours truly didn’t miss any in this overview:

Check out the guide for submissions if you’re thinking about adding your own Perl 6 solutions.

A Language Creators’ Conversation

Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Larry Wall & Anders Hejlsberg sat together at the latest PuPPy meeting in Seattle and discussed language creation. Sadly, the audio of the video is very bad. Regardless of that, it spurred quite a discussion on Hacker News. Good to see Larry up and about!

Looking for Grant Committee Members

The TPF Grant Committee is looking for new members. Being a member involves needing to read any official grant proposals (which you might be reading already anyway), and submitting a vote once every 2 months or so, possibly after some mailing list discussion. (Facebook comments).

YACM

Or, welcome Patrick Böker, our latest Yet Another Core Member on the Rakudo Perl 6 project. Patrick was recently involved in making the build of Rakudo Perl 6 completely relocatable, which is very much welcomed by various packagers of Rakudo Perl 6. Looking forward to see much more of this good work!

Aearnus looking at Perl 6

A student at the University of Arizona for mathematics and theatre has written two blog posts about Perl 6 in the past week, which both created quite a stir.

The first one titled “A Whirlwind Tour of Perl 6’s Best Features” starts with:

It’s rare that I find a language that I truly feel innovates upon established conventions and features.

(Reddit comments). This blog post also started a large discussion on /r/programming titled Maybe it’s finally time to give Perl 6 a shot.

The second blog post was titled “Perl 6 is the World’s Worst ML (with addendum by Damian Conway)” (ML on Wikipedia), with quite a few comments on /r/perl6 and Hacker News.

Nice to see two such positive blog posts coming from an unexpected source!

Javascript backend update

Paweł Murias reports on the progress of the work on the Javascript backend of Rakudo Perl 6. Precompilation is still an issue. And a bug found in Chrome. And future plans! Kudos again to Paweł Murias for all this hard work. So good to see it coming to fruition!

Practical Perl 6 Regexes

Brian Duggan has published the slides of his presentation about Practical Perl 6 Regexes given at the DC Baltimore Perl Workshop last weekend.

Perl 6 not so full of art

A blog post showing that 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs completely disregarded the fact that with use strict (which has been recommended to be used always for at least past 25 years) this number would be closer to zero. Ah well, some people get stuck in the “then they laugh at you” phase (Hacker News comments with some Perl 6 references).

Swiss Perl Workshop CFP

About a week after the European Perl Conference, there will be the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 in Olten on 16 and 17 August. The Call for Papers has been opened. Please submit your Perl 6 presentations for what looks it’s going to be another nice and cosy Swiss Perl Workshop!

Core developments

Ticket status of past week.

Jonathan Worthington fixed various memory leaks that occurred with certain types of long running programs and certain combinations of asynchronous and parallelizing features. He also made the inline limit settable per language, allowing for a smaller limit for NQP. This appears to make building and testing of Rakudo Perl 6 about 5% faster.

fixed various memory leaks that occurred with certain types of long running programs and certain combinations of asynchronous and parallelizing features. He also made the inline limit settable per language, allowing for a smaller limit for NQP. This appears to make building and testing of Rakudo Perl 6 about 5% faster. Patrick Böker fixed a build issue on Windows. And he also made sure that Rakudo will build and install on operating systems that do not have a bash installed by default.

fixed a build issue on Windows. And he also made sure that Rakudo will build and install on operating systems that do not have a installed by default. Tom Browder improved the README.md to include notes about testing.

improved the to include notes about testing. Ben Davies fixed handling of some edge-cases of parameters to ThreadPoolScheduler.cue .

fixed handling of some edge-cases of parameters to . Wenjie Sun fixed a problem with deprecation message of the handling of the RAKUDO_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable.

fixed a problem with deprecation message of the handling of the environment variable. And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Facebook

Happy Todd by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Meanwhile on Twitter

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

Algorithm::HierarchicalPAM by Itsuki Toyota .

. Acme::Polyglot::Levenshtein::Damerau by Nick Logan .

. Intl::CLDR by Matthew ‘Matéu’ Stephen Stuckwisch .

. Text::LDIF by Sylwester Lunski.

Updated modules:

Acme::Cow by Elizabeth Mattijsen .

. Term::Choose, Term::Form, Term::TablePrint, Term::Choose::Util by Matthäus Kiem .

. FindBin by Steven Lembark .

. NativeHelpers::Callback, LibUUID by Curt Tilmes .

. Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata .

. LogP6 by Mikhail Khorkov.

Winding Down

An exciting week with many submissions, blog posts and quite a few positive comments and support from unexpected corners of the interwebs. Tis looking a lot like spring! Please check in again next week for more news about Perl 6!