When @lizmat asked me to write a post for the Raku advent calendar I was initially a bit at a loss. I have spent most of the year not writing Raku but working on my own language Funktal, a postfix functional language that compiles to Uxntal, the stack-based assembly language for the tiny Uxn virtual machine. But as Raku is nothingContinue reading “Day 4 – Embedding a stack-based programming language in Raku”
Tag Archives: rakulang
Day 3 – Helping the Elves Sort Their Mail
Lately, I’ve been a bit obsessed with Dave Thomas’s CodeKata series, and especially solving these problems in Raku. In this post, I want to talk about different ways of writing Raku and how to measure performance. We’ll focus on part 2 of Kata 11: Sorting It Out. Approach #1: Let’s Use a Regex! Raku, being a descendant of Perl,Continue reading “Day 3 – Helping the Elves Sort Their Mail”
Day 2 – An update on raku.land
A couple of years ago we gave a talk at the The Raku Conference 2021 which served both as an announcement and an introduction of raku.land. It was an exciting time for us, since it was the first time we were officially addressing the community, and we were keen to see how our work would beContinue reading “Day 2 – An update on raku.land”
Day 1 – Rocking Raku Meets Stodgy Debian
A unique method for installing Raku on Debian hosts. Rumbling in the rack room Santa’s IT department was now fully invested in using Raku, and it was paying off in increased programmer efficiency as well as toy output. But old elf Eli, a system administrator, was grumbling to himself that it was a lot ofContinue reading “Day 1 – Rocking Raku Meets Stodgy Debian”
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”
All the blog posts of 2021
For easy perusing.
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”
Raku Advent Calendar 