The Ethereum blockchain is essentially a transaction-based state machine. We begin with a blank state, before any transactions have happened on the network, and move into some final state when tran… | Continue reading
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 w… | Continue reading
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… | Continue reading
He had taken a new name for most of the usual reasons, and for a few unusual ones as well, not the least of which was the fact that names were important to him. — Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the … | Continue reading
Quite a while ago, Santa got a feature request for a web application called AGRAMMON, developed by the elves of one of his sub-contractors Oetiker+Partner AG in what then was called Perl 5. When Sa… | Continue reading
One day, I started wondering if it would be possible to parse Clojure namespace forms and generate a dependency graph of the various namespaces used in a real-world Clojure project. While that was … | Continue reading
‘Perl is dead’, is a meme that’s just plain wrong. Perl isn’t dead. It’s just dead to some programmers. Complicated regexes? Sigils? There’s more than one way to… | Continue reading
Now that it’s December, it’s time for two of my favorite traditions from the tech world: the Raku Advent Calendar and Advent of Code. These two holiday traditions have a fair amount in … | Continue reading
A little preface with an off-topic first. In the process of writing this post I was struck by the worst sysadmin’s nightmare: loss of servers followed by a bad backup. Until the very last moment I … | Continue reading
RFC 307, on what happens when an object has already been built. | Continue reading
Proposed on 7 September 2000, frozen on 20 September 2000, depends on RFC 159: True Polymorphic Objects proposed on 25 August 2000, frozen on 16 September 2000, also by Nathan Wiger&… | Continue reading
Proposed on 25 August 2000, frozen on 16 September 2000 On polymorphism RFC159 introduces the concept of true polymorphic object. Objects that can morph into numbers, strings, booleans and much mor… | Continue reading
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 re… | Continue reading
This RFC was originally proposed on August 7th 2020 and frozen in six weeks. It described a frustration with comparison operations in Perl. The expression: “cat” == “dog” #T… | Continue reading
Let’s talk about a fun RFC that mostly did not make its way into current day Raku, nor is it planned for later implementation. This is about RFC 64 by Nathan Wiger. Let me quote the abstract:… | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 R… | Continue reading
Proposed on 27 August 2000, frozen on 20 September 2000, which was a generalization of RFC 26: Named operators versus functions proposed on 4 August 2000, frozen on 28 August 2000, also by&nbs… | Continue reading
Now, as you have read the title and already stopped laughing… Er, not all of you yet? Ok, I’ll give you another minute… Good, let’s be serious now. RFC 137 was written by Da… | Continue reading