perlweeklychallenge-club VS perl5

Each week Mohammad S. Anwar sends out The Weekly Challenge, a chance for all of us to come up with solutions to two weekly tasks. My solutions are written in Python first, and then converted to Perl. It's a great way for us all to practice some coding.

In the previous edition Mohammad sent a call to get sponsor for his Weekly programming challenge. Several people replied to me. Those messages were forwarded to Mohammad as that is his gig. However, I noticed that the link we used to have at the top of the Perl Weekly was only showing up on the web site. I added it back. In a nutshell, if you'd like to spoonsor/financially help the work of Mohammad S Anwar then either contact him or just support him via Patreon. If you'd like to support my work then you can do so either via Patreon or via GitHub.

I run The Weekly Challenge project primarily focus on Perl and Raku but open to all programming languages. It was started on 25th March 2019. It has been going on un-interrupted ever since, thanks to the strong 350+ members of Team PWC. We were lucky enough to have solo sponsor, Perl Careers run by Peter Sergeant since July 2019 without break. Initially we had weekly prize sponsorship but later it was changed to monthly sponsorship. The best part was, I didn't have to move a finger to find the sponsor. Pete was generous enough to come forward and continued supporting the project for such a long time.

Challenge, My solutions

I am not sure, if you noticed this but Perl Mongers certificate expired few days ago. I only noticed as one of the contributor to The Weekly Challenge shared link to the site. The very next day, I saw post by Olaf Alders on Twitter talking about it and sharing the tool that can help avoid such incident in future. The certificate has now been restored.

Oh yes, Bruce Gray was a major influence for me as well a couple of years ago. He often participates in the "Raku Study Group" meetings as well - these are very broad and informal meetings every second Sunday but around the end, Bruce almost always brings up some Raku (sometimes Perl) solutions for the weekly challenges from https://theweeklychallenge.org/. In case you are interested, the repo of the meetups: https://github.com/doomvox/raku-study

Back to the topic. I picked up Raku a couple of years ago and I mostly use it as a better shell.

The pros are that you can really quickly and swiftly deliver CLI automation tools and scripts; the language has a unique but very practical regex syntax, you have very rich tools for string manipulation and you have good utilities to "drain CPU" if you are willing to spend more resources to make something faster (e.g easy multithreading for operations). Also, the language is very pleasant to use, it makes you feel very clever and powerful.

The cons cannot be neglected, however, the biggest problem probably being the performance and stability of the only actually working compiler, Rakudo, and its most functioning bytecode VM, MoarVM. The rich string-processing system and regex engine can be surprisingly slothful if you have vast amounts of text, same for precise bigint and rational computations (which are the default). Not many people understand Rakudo (and especially the VMs) enough to work on bugs or performance improvements, and there are not many low-hanging fruit remaining. Considering this, I'm sad that there has been little strategy regarding getting new maintainers, or having a release strategy besides "we will not change anything that might break code, and just release new compiler versions every couple of months".

Also, I don't know how much this is a con for you but Raku is not a language you can just "learn", you have to explore it and always be ready for a new journey. It's a horizontally huge language with a lot of corner cases you probably cannot all keep in mind. I think I'm managing pretty well but it is definitely a risk; you should probably either find a small subset you are comfortable working with and stick to it, or be okay with exploration using whatever goes, from asking others and reading the docs to investigating the core library inside Rakudo (which is not as bad as it may sound but not everybody wants to do).

Each week Mohammad S. Anwar sends out The Weekly Challenge, a chance for all of us to come up with solutions to two weekly tasks. My solutions are written in Python first, and then converted to Perl. It's a great way for us all to practice some coding.

I had almost forgot about participating The Perl and Raku Conference 2023 because of what I have gone through in the last few weeks and still going on. But the best part is, I have booked everything from air ticket to hotel reservations. Having said, I still have to get the slides ready for the my talk about The Weekly Challenge. If you are planning to attend the conference then please do come and see me. I would love to meet as many Perl enthusiasts as I can. I am mostly looking forward to meet the weekly challenge members. I got exactly 2 weeks time to get everything sorted before it is too late.

It's been a very long time that I've made a post that wasn't related to The Weekly Challenge, but it's about time I did :)

I was not signed into GitHub. I opened the permalink and it displayed fine. I opened the raw page in another tab; it was fine.

Nothing to do with a fixing the trap, it turns out: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/4197fe35a33e6471f8f532abfd06cd6c120f180e which leads to https://rt.perl.org/perl5/Ticket/Display.html?id=109408

As we mentioned last week, this week we are working on a portable, symbolic link implementation that also works on Windows. You can see our progress here. To implement this, the Perl win32/win32.c source code would be greatly appreciated.