In the previous post, I made a case for why programming languages should have a utility library that provides small-but-commonly-needed functions. Today I’m introducing a Raku package that I hope will fill that gap and discussing how this fits with the Unix philosophy
Tag Archives: Raku
Day 6 – Following the Unix philosophy without getting left-pad
The Unix philosophy famously holds that you should write software that “does one thing, and does it well”. But following that advice too literally can lead to the micro-package dystopia that got us left-pad. But there is a way to write libraries that do only one thing without getting left-pad
It’s that time of the year
When we start all over again with advent calendars, publishing one article a day until Christmas. This is going to be the first full year with Raku being called Raku, and the second year we have moved to this new site. However, it’s going to be the 12th year (after this first article) in aContinue reading “It’s that time of the year”
RFC 84 by Damian Conway: => => =>
RFC 84 by Damian Conway: Replace => (stringifying comma) with => (pair constructor) Yet another nice goodie from Damian, truly what you might expect from the interlocutor and explicator! The fat comma operator, =>, was originally used to separate values – with a twist. It behave just like , operator did, but modified parsing toContinue reading “RFC 84 by Damian Conway: => => =>”
RFC 188, by Damian Conway: Objects: Private keys and methods
Break someone’s code today! On September 1st of 2000 Damian Conway sent a proposal №188, promoting the idea of Private Keys and Methods. In those days, Perl’s object-oriented programming relied heavily on hashes. Indeed, a hash can store data values by keys, as well as references to routines, which is how you can describe anContinue reading “RFC 188, by Damian Conway: Objects: Private keys and methods”
RFC 5, by Michael J. Mathews: Multiline comments
This is the first RFC proposed related to documentation. It asks for a common feature in most of the modern programming languages: multiline comments. The problem of not having multi-line comments is quite obvious: if you need to comment a large chunk of code, you need to manually insert a # symbol at the beginningContinue reading “RFC 5, by Michael J. Mathews: Multiline comments”
RFC 225: Superpositions (aka Junctions)
Damian Conway is one of those names in the Perl and Raku world that almost doesn’t need explaining. He is one of the most prolific contributors to CPAN and was foundational in the design of Raku (then Perl 6). One of his more interesting proposals came in RFC225 on Superpositions, which suggested making his PerlContinue reading “RFC 225: Superpositions (aka Junctions)”
20 years ago tomorrow
20 years ago, on the first of August, the inception of a language started to, well, incept. Actually, it started a bit earlier than that. Perl was in need of change, so it was decided that the community itself should propose what the language needed to do to go forward one step, from Perl 5Continue reading “20 years ago tomorrow”
Day 16: Raku powered jmp-ing to the coalface
Santa makes sure his elves can get to and from the workplace quickly. I wish it was the same for computer programming! Sometimes it takes a while to wade through a codebase to find where the real work needs to happen. jmp is a Raku powered command-line utility I use for searching and jumping aroundContinue reading “Day 16: Raku powered jmp-ing to the coalface”
Day 14 – Thinking Beyond Types: an Introduction to Rakudo’s MOP
It’s Christmas season! Christmas would not be Christmas without the caroling that’s part of the festivities, so let’s make it possible to sing some. We could simply make a carol one giant string, but that’s not good enough. Being a song, carols often have a chorus that’s repeated in between verses. If we were toContinue reading “Day 14 – Thinking Beyond Types: an Introduction to Rakudo’s MOP”
Raku Advent Calendar 