2022 – Raku Advent Calendar

Day 25: Rakudo 2022 Review

In a year as eventful as 2022 was in the real world, it is a good idea to look back to see what one might have missed while life was messing with your (Raku) plans. Rakudo saw about 1500 commits this year, about the same as the year before that. Many of these were bugContinue reading “Day 25: Rakudo 2022 Review”

Day 24: He’s making a list… (part 2)

In our last edition, we learned about some of the work that Santa’s elves put into automating how they make their lists. What you probably didn’t know is that the elves stay on top of the latest and greatest technology. Being well-known avid Raku programmers, the elves were excited to hear about RakuAST and decidedContinue reading “Day 24: He’s making a list… (part 2)”

Day 23: Sigils followup: semantics and language design

I was wrong about the semantics of Raku’s sigils. What does that mean for their power? And what can the difference teach us about language design more broadly?

Day 22: He’s making a list… (part 1)

If there’s anything that Santa and his elves ought to know, it’s how to make a list. After all, they’re reading lists that children send in, and Santa maintains his very famous list. Another thing we know is that Santa and his elves are quite multilingual. So one day one of the elfs decided that,Continue reading “Day 22: He’s making a list… (part 1)”

Day 21: Raku and I: Journey begin …

It has been ages since I last blogged about Raku. The only time, I have blogged about when I took part in The Weekly Challenge. But then this also changed recently as I finally found time to contribute to the weekly fun challenges but no blogging still. I would say it is all about myContinue reading “Day 21: Raku and I: Journey begin …”

Day 20: Sigils are an underappreciated programming technology

Sigils have a bit of a bad reputation. According to their detractors, sigils are “just a way of encoding type information” in variable names – basically a glorified version of apps Hungarian notation (which isn’t even the good kind of Hungarian notation). Maybe sigils served a purpose in the bad old days, but now we have fancy IDEs and editors can give us all the type information we might want, and these modern tools have made sigils obsolete.

Or so they say. But I disagree – as do many of the hackers whose perspectives and insights I value most.

So my goal in this post is to convince you that sigils are a powerful tool for writing clear, expressive code. In fact, I’ll go further: Sigils are a powerful tool for clear communication in general – that they’re useful for programming is just an application of the more general rule.

Day 19: A few modules to ease working with databases in Raku applications

There’s no single big Raku application I work on regularly at the moment, but there’s plenty of smaller ones that I need to do a bit of work on now and then. Nearly all of them involve using a database for persistence; I tend to reach for Postgres. This year I put together a fewContinue reading “Day 19: A few modules to ease working with databases in Raku applications”

Day 18: Something else

Santa was absent-mindedly going through the Rakudo commits of the past weeks, after hearing about the new 2022.12 release of the Rakudo compiler. And noticed that there were no commits after that release anymore. Had all the elves been too busy doing other stuff in the Holiday Season, he wondered. But, in other years, the Raku coreContinue reading “Day 18: Something else”

Day 17: How to clarify which parts of the documentation change

Using Pod::To::HTML2 a new custom FormatCode, D<> (D for deprecation), can be made to help with the Raku Documentation process. The new FormatCode should show a span of documentation that is deprecated in some way. This happens a lot when Rakudo is being upgraded. However, people using older versions of Rakudo need to understand whatContinue reading “Day 17: How to clarify which parts of the documentation change”