Elizabeth Mattijsen

Raku Steering Council Q&A panel is aimed at the audience interested in the Raku® programming language, its current state, and its future. Members of the Council will try to answer any related questions, including those about the Council itself.

Other people: Juan Julián Merelo Stefan Seifert (nine) Daniel Sockwell Vadim Belman Geoffrey Broadwell

The Raku ecosystem is growing at an impressive rate. The Raku Programming Language allows developers to specify the exact version of a module that is needed in production. This is a very good thing, and makes sysadmins all over the world pretty happy, as they know they can install new versions of modules without fear of breaking production code.

However, developers can also remove distributions from the ecosystem. This presentation describes efforts to make sure that this will never become a problem for production.

Set operators are often seen as a way to handle (semi-)complex mathematical issues, the only exists in Set objects. But set operators are so much more! This presentation will show you how to make use of set operators in your day-to-day code, making your code more concise, better readable and better maintainable.

I will discuss some of the types of optimisations that I performed on the Rakudo Perl 6 Core to make Rakudo Perl 6 about 3x faster in 2016 for many applications. How some optimisations became less necessary because of optimisations in MoarVM and/or nqp, but still made sense to do in the end. How a lot of optimisations were just about cutting out unnecessary intermediate steps that would make sense in any programming language. And how readability and elegance of the code suffered. No C code was involved, so basic Perl skills should be enough to follow this presentation.

It has been a long beginning for Perl 6. Years of design, implementation, re-design, and re-implementation, left many wondering if the beginning would be eternal. They say in software you should plan to build one to throw away, because you will anyway. It turns out that "one" can be overly optimistic.

But, finally, we have reached the end of the beginning.

The point where the quest for the perfect Perl 6 has become the clear enemy of the really rather good Perl 6 we have. And, critically, the point where keeping Perl 6 user's production code working between releases will take a firm priority over language improvement.

In this session I'll look back over my eight years of involvement in the Perl 6 project, share some of my favorite examples of Perl 6 code from my talks over the years (and probably some new ones), provide hints on how to dive into the language, and take a look at what lies ahead.

Perl has always been improving itself, mostly by evolution, sometimes by revolution. One such revolution, was the start of the Perl 6 development effort in 2000. In the meantime, after a period of impasse, Perl (5) continued evolving gradually. However, it now (2013) seems that the original Perl 1/2/3/4/5 code base has reached a level of jenga that makes it virtually impossible for anybody to make very much needed structural changes.This presentation will give an overview of how different projects are now attacking this problem.