Category Archives: Programming techniques

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 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”

Day 14: Trove – yet another TAP harness

Since the early Pheix versions, I have paid a lot of attention to testing system. Initially it was a set of unit tests – I tried to cover a huge range of units like classes, methods, subroutines and conditions. In some cases I have combined unit and functional testing within one .t file, like it’sContinue reading “Day 14: Trove – yet another TAP harness”

Day 13: Virtual Environments in Raku

Envious? If not, run zef install Envy and let’s start exploring virtual comp unit repositories. Hold the phone! What are we doing? We’re going to explore using a module allowing us to have virtual module environments in our very favorite raku. Why do we want this? Many reasons but a few would include: Sold? Continue on! GettingContinue reading “Day 13: Virtual Environments in Raku”

Day 10: SparrowCI pipelines cascades of fun

Remember the young guy in the previous SparrowCI story? We have not finished with him yet … Because New Year time is coming and brings us a lot of fun, or we can say cascades of fun … So, our awesome SparrowCI pipelines plumber guy is busy with sending the gift to his nephew: sparrow.yaml:Continue reading “Day 10: SparrowCI pipelines cascades of fun”