Tag Archives: Raku

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 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 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 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 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 25 – Future-proofing the Raku Programming Language

Around this time last year, Jonathan Worthington was writing their Advent Post called Reminiscence, refinement, revolution. Today, yours truly finds themselves writing a similar blog post after what can only be called a peculiar year in the world. The Language Visible Changes The most visible highlights in the Raku Programming Language are basically: last / next with a value Normally, last just stopsContinue reading “Day 25 – Future-proofing the Raku Programming Language”

Day 19 – Let it Cro

Ah, advent. That time of year when the shops are filled with the sound of Christmas songs – largely, the very same ones they played when I was a kid. They’re a bit corny, but the familiarity is somehow reassuring. And what better way to learn about this year’s new Cro features than through the words ofContinue reading “Day 19 – Let it Cro”