Yes, Naoum Hankache‘s perl6intro.com has been translated to Chinese by ohmycloud and wenjie1991. I guess that adds about 1 billion people being able to start learning Perl 6 in their native language. I can’t help but think: Hindi anybody? 🙂

Releases

Last weekend saw the release of Rakudo 2016.11. If you’re too lazy to compile the source, you can also download Claudio Ramirez‘ CentOS and Ubuntu packages. Since the problems that plagued the installation of Rakudo Star 2016.10 on Windows have been fixed, it is now possible again to make a full release of Rakudo Star. Which Steve Mynott started working on only moments after the compiler release was cut by Zoffix Znet. This has resulted in a Rakudo Star 2016.11 Release Candidate. Please check it out! A lot of things should have gotten significantly faster since the last fully functional Rakudo Star release (2016.07).

Dates For The Perl Conferences

Next year will see at least two Perl conferences: The Perl Conference NA on 18-23 June 2017 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Which is very close to Washington, DC, so plenty of things to see there! Later that year will see The Perl Conference in Amsterdam on 9-11 August at B.Amsterdam in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Plenty to see and do there as well! So mark these dates in your agendas! Please note that neither of these conferences are in any way affiliated with O’Reilly Media.

Advent Season

There are still slots available for the Perl 6 Advent Calendar! If you have something to tell about Perl 6, this is a nice place to do it with quite some exposure!

Books

This week saw a flurry of announcements about Perl 6 books and associated blog posts.

For those of you with your feet firmly in Perl 5 ground, you might want to check out brian d foy‘s Learning Perl 6 Kickstarter which already has more than 225 backers. A Perl 6 version of the bestselling Learning Perl, also published by O’Reilly. What is there not to like? If you/the company you work for/with supports this Kickstarter well enough, you will not only get a day of an on-site Perl 6 course given by brian, but also two days of Perl 5 courses! Reddit comments here and here.

Moritz Lenz announced Perl 6 By Example, in which he wants to recycle the approach taken in Using Perl 6 to introduce topics by example. It would not be a comprehensive guide to the Perl 6 language, but enough to get you started (Reddit comments).

And then there is Ken Youens-Clark‘s Metagenomics book in which all examples are written in Perl 6. And Laurent Rosenfeld‘s adaptation of Think Python , Think Perl 6 – How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, which is also in the works. All in all exciting news from the Perl 6 book front!

Core Developments

Zoffix Znet added a parse-base sub/method, which converts a Str in a 2..36 base to base-10 Numeric , and sanitized the use of Whatever with base . He also made sure that .defined works properly in conjunction with Junction s.

added a sub/method, which converts a in a 2..36 base to base-10 , and sanitized the use of with . He also made sure that works properly in conjunction with s. Jonathan Worthington fixed a long standing issue with concurrent use of the same string as a hash key. This work also saves 8 bytes per hash key. He also made sure that you can use a Regex as a TOP rule in a Grammar .

fixed a long standing issue with concurrent use of the same string as a hash key. This work also saves per hash key. He also made sure that you can use a as a rule in a . Pepe Schwarz implemented attributive parameter binding on the JVM.

implemented attributive parameter binding on the JVM. Stefan Seifert fixed the fact that a Match was pretending to be a value type: it is not!

fixed the fact that a was pretending to be a value type: it is not! Elizabeth Mattijsen made initializations of shaped arrays at least 10x faster. She also activated the possibility of creating native shaped string arrays (aka my str @a[5] ).

made initializations of at least 10x faster. She also activated the possibility of creating native shaped string arrays (aka ). And quite a number of other fixes and improvements!

Blog Posts

Ecosystem Additions

File::Ignore by Jonathan Worthington .

. Crust::Middleware::Session::Store::DBIish by Mark Rushing .

. Statistics::LinearRegression by Paweł Szulc .

. URL::Find by Samantha McVey.

Winding Down

Wow, it’s been a while since there was that much to tell about a week in Perl 6! I like where this is going! Check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!