In his compelling blog post titled “On Troll Hugging, Hole Digging, and Improving Open Source Communities (How to be Better)”, Zoffix Znet describes how to make Open Source communities even better, building on Audrey Tang’s “hug a troll” concept.

…here’s a well-shaped hole. Everyone’s more connected. It’s easy to get in and start digging. And even those who dug the deepest can still go and help out those who are about to start.

The hole digging metaphor isn’t just about the shape of the hole. It’s also about people’s position within it.

He also introduces the seven Hugs for a better community:

Gift a Shovel Feed The Hand That Bites You We All Leave Footprints Speak Up Simply a Hug Love Others Go For The Third Option

Zoffix shows in his examples that we can all learn to become better. And that he finds himself to be a lot happier because of this learning process:

…I’ve been applying the ideas I discussed in this article for about a week. I think they have something real behind them, as I feel a lot happier now than a week ago and I see some positive changes around me that I think I could attribute to these ideas

A well recommended read!

P6::Journey

Thanks to the pingback functionality, yours truly was pointed to a new blog about Rakudo Perl 6: P6::Journey by p6steve. His blog posts so far:

All yours truly can add is: Welcome to the Rakudo Perl 6 Blogoverse!

Unicode Grant update #4

Samantha McVey continued working on the Unicode support in Rakudo Perl 6 and reports on her progress in a blog post. It describes how using the Knuth-Morris-Pratt String Search Algorithm improved string searching, how looking for a single grapheme can be 9x faster in some situations, that the database is updated to Unicode 10, and that several bugs were fixed and documentation improved. Among many other things. A good read if you want to keep up-to-date in that area of Rakudo Perl 6!

Swiss Perl Workshop in review

Steve Mynott created an excellent diary-like blog-post about the Swiss Perl Workshop, with lots of pictures. Looking forward to many more of these in the future!

In related news, the videos of the Swiss Perl Workshop have been made available by Lee Johnson. The Rakudo Perl 6 related presentations for which videos were made, are:

Other blog posts

Other videos

Some more recent than others, but these somehow slipped through the cracks the past weeks.

Other core developments

This week yours truly was reminded that a lot can happen in two weeks. Let me try to recap this in a way that is not overly long without letting important things fall through the cracks:

Andrew Ruder fixed several issues with Supply.batch . Elizabeth Mattijsen continued on that work by making sure List s are returned rather than Array s, which saves an extra copying step.

fixed several issues with . continued on that work by making sure s are returned rather than s, which saves an extra copying step. andreoss made it possible to pipe Perl 6 source code to perl6 without having the REPL being invoked.

made it possible to pipe Perl 6 source code to without having the being invoked. Daniel Green made the handling of the ignorecase and ignoremark when interpolating strings into regexes, much faster thanks to the new nqp::eqatic , nqp::eqatim and nqp::eqaticim opcodes added by Samantha McVey .

made the handling of the and when interpolating strings into regexes, much faster thanks to the new , and opcodes added by . Jonathan Worthington did a lot of work on MoarVM, about which he will surely elaborate in a soon to be seen blog post. Meanwhile, he also made sure that --ll-exception flag is also honoured in the case of a broken Promise returned by a start block. And he activated output buffering for non-TTY handles by default. This (and other optimizations) makes the writing a million lines benchmark only 1.2x slower than the Pumpking Perl 5 version.

did a lot of work on MoarVM, about which he will surely elaborate in a soon to be seen blog post. Meanwhile, he also made sure that flag is also honoured in the case of a broken returned by a block. And he activated output buffering for non-TTY handles by default. This (and other optimizations) makes the writing a million lines benchmark than the Pumpking Perl 5 version. Elizabeth Mattijsen made sure that you can now concatenate a string to a Junction , or concatenate two Junction s. This also implies that you can now interpolate a Junction into a string, and that List.join is no longer guaranteed to return a Str (because it will return a Junction if one of the elements of the List was a Junction ).

made sure that you can now concatenate a string to a , or concatenate two s. This also implies that you can now interpolate a into a string, and that is no longer guaranteed to return a (because it will return a if one of the elements of the was a ). And many other fixes and improvements that aren’t not really visible yet. Such as the merging of a lot of the work that Bart Wiegmans has done on the new JIT, and the work that Timo Paulssen is doing on speeding up the MoarVM heap analyzer.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Jeff Goff said: 0th cut of perl6-Grammar-Common up on GitHub – https://github.com/drforr/perl6-Grammar-Common. Add also does Grammar::Common::Expression::Infix to your grammar, supply a token and you get an rule that you can drop anywhere you want a simple but complete mathematical expression. It provides both grammar rules and some simple actions to generate a basic .ast consisting of nested hashes that you can walk on your own, or override the provided methods and generate your own object tree.

said: 0th cut of perl6-Grammar-Common up on GitHub – https://github.com/drforr/perl6-Grammar-Common. Add to your grammar, supply a token and you get an rule that you can drop anywhere you want a simple but complete mathematical expression. It provides both grammar rules and some simple actions to generate a basic consisting of nested hashes that you can walk on your own, or override the provided methods and generate your own object tree. Anushka Jodha asked: “Can we use Rakudo Perl 6 with Angular 2 like typescript and scala.js ???”. Jeff Goff answered: “Depends upon what you mean by “use” – It’s always been possible for Pumpking Perl 5 and Angular to coexist, what this project does is adds routes to Bailador that lets it serve your Angular 2 code. What I intend to do with this is add a Rakudo Perl 6 wrapper around whatever tool that generates the Angular 2 code which puts a Bailador route in place, then shells out to the Angular toolkit.”

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Ecosystem Additions

FastCGI::NativeCall::Async by Jonathan Stowe .

. Net::IP::Lite by Tom Browder .

. Net::ZMQ by Gabriel Ash.

Winding Down

Hope I didn’t miss too much this week. Please let me know if I did. Hope to see you all again next week for more Rakudo Perl 6 news!