Tyler Limkemann (aka aearnus) created quite a stir once again with a blog post titled “Perl 6 is Cursed! I hate it!” (subtitled: “… and other myths people tell themselves to sleep well at night…”). It got some positive reviews on /r/perl6 and on Facebook, but the Hacker News (~200 comments) and /r/programming (~150 comments) readers were generally much less enthusiastic, euphemistically speaking. And then there were some comments on Lobsters, /r/perl, r/programmingcirclejerk, /r/hackernews. It just goes to show there is still a long way to go to make Perl 6 more appreciated by many more people.

Cro 0.8.1 released

Jonathan Worthington proudly announced version 0.8.1 of Cro, the Perl 6 micro-services framework. This includes a new component called Cro::WebApp that provides HTML templating the Perl 6 way. And an updated version of Log::Timeline for keeping track of how long many asynchronously executing and overlapping tasks actually take.

PerlCon in Riga

With only a few weeks to go until the Perl Conference in Riga, organizer Andrew Shitov informs us that all conference tickets that were sold so far, have been sent. So if you registered and did not get the ticket, something is wrong and you probably need to check your email better.

There are 212 tickets for attendees now, of whom 186 are confirmed. That’s including 38 confirmed speakers. Furthermore, it has been confirmed that Booking.com has become a Silver Sponsor, and that ShadowCat, with support of the Enlightened Perl Organisation will be taking care of the video recording.

And of course, you can still buy a ticket for this excellent programme.

Leaving irc.perl.org

A sad story about the primary operator of irc.perl.org leaving. As Jeff Goff put it on Facebook: please thank the people that make everything happen behind the scenes every now and then. It is generally a thankless job: a token of appreciation every now and then is worth a lot! This caused comments on blogs.perl.org, Reddit and Hacker News.

Course Grant approved

Andrew Shitov‘s grant request to develop a complete Perl 6 course has been approved and funded by the TPF Grant Committee! (Facebook comments). Looking forward to the result!

Survey

JJ Merelo has published the results of this year’s Perl 6 Survey. Check it out!

TIOBE

Thanks to the work of Steven Penny, Perl 6 has now entered the TIOBE index at #93, as noted by JJ Merelo. So now is the time to blog about Perl 6! Since TIOBE searches for “Perl 6 programming”, please make sure to include that somewhere in your posts!

Squashathon

And what a Squashathon it was! This time aimed at adding as many mathematical sequences as possible. Quite a few got added, and some helper subs were created. And the winner is thundergnat! A plushy Camelia will be sent as soon as we know thundergnat’s whereabouts. (Facebook comments).

Tracing what’s missing

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer realized that grammar s are just classes and used that to find out where parsing a log file failed without needing the Grammar::Debugger .

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week there were quite a few blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #15:

Laurent Rosenfeld took the opportunity to publish another blog post, inspired by the Perl Weekly Challenge, but this time focused on functional programming in Perl.

Damian Conway looked back on the challenge of the previous week with an excellent blog post titled “As simple as possible…but no simpler (Reddit, Hacker News comments). Again, highly recommended.

Mohammad S. Anwar started another series of blog posts. This time consisting of interviews with Perl Weekly Challenge winners, called “Meet The Champions”. So far there are two entries:

Meanwhile, Challenge #15 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

Ticket status of the past week.

Daniel Green fixed an issue with the MoarVM implementation of prime number checking. And he merged all of his work on changing native num to native int calculations in NQP (see PR #2670).

fixed an issue with the MoarVM implementation of prime number checking. And he merged all of his work on changing native to native calculations in NQP (see PR #2670). Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed signal so that you can specify an array of signals.

fixed so that you can specify an array of signals. And some more improvements and fixes, still in anticipation of the next Rakudo Perl 6 release, being prepared by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, Kane Valentine and Samantha McVey.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

Perl 6 on the console by Andrew Shitov.

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

Proc::Feed by Jack Kuan .

. Cro::WebApp by Jonathan Worthington .

. Compress::Zstd by Timo Paulssen .

. Libarchive by Curt Tilmes.

Updated modules:

JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen .

. Digest::BubbleBabble by Ben Davies .

. FindBin, FileSystem::Parent, FindBin::libs by Steven Lembark .

. Log::Timeline, cro, Cro::Core, Cro::HTTP, Cro::TLS, Cro::WebSocket, Cro::ZeroMQ by Jonathan Worthington .

. Pod::Render by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding Down

What a week that was. Not a lot visually happening on the core, but so many things around it: new and updated modules, blog posts, squashathon. Looking forward to next week, for more Perl 6 news. See you then!