#WritersCoffeeClub May 28: Do you have advice for other authors that you haven't heard from different sources?
Yes: "there's more than one way to do it." (For almost any value of "it" that doesn't involve mathematics or formal logic.)
This is actually advice from a programmer, Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) but it applies especially strongly to writing fiction. Whatever you're trying to do, consider alternative ways of doing it.
I'm handling sponsorships for this year's Perl and Raku Conference. Please share this far and wide so that we can get as many new sponsors as possible. ❤️
Everyone! If your #business depends on #Perl or #RakuLang please consider supporting the communities you rely on!
One good way to ensure a sustainable future for #OpenSource ecosystems like these, is to support active and fertile venues for learning and teaching these technologies.
Right now, you can help by supporting the Perl and Raku Conference, and later this year, the London Perl Workshop.
Is this relevant for you? Forward it to your manager! 💯
Started reading ‘Modern Perl’ on the train to work the other day. #Perl was the first programming language I learned, 20 years ago now, but I’ve hardly used it in probably 15 years now.
Not yet sure what I’d use it for, though. Better shell scripts? I’d normally choose Python/Ruby for that.
I work Cybersecurity, I mostly use #Perl for quick one-off scans when someone asks me, "are we vulnerable to XYZ?" when XYZ has a (mis)configuration element to it.
A lot of my hobby code is using #Rakulang these days as I really enjoy the language's mutability.
If you’re designing a programming language, please consider allowing hyphens in identifiers. Hyphen-separated text (kebab-case) is more readable than camelCase, and doesn’t require use of the shift key like camelCase and snake_case. There’s no ambiguity with subtraction if you require spaces around binary operators (which every style guide I’ve ever used requires anyway).
The baseline solution in Java clocks in just under 5 seconds, so with Raku what should be a decent timing for a closest translation of that. The optimized solutions are less than 2 seconds.
I really like #rakulang, in theory, and would like to use it more, but whenever I have something to write, I still often end up with using #perl for it.
Just the latest example: I had to write a simple text-wrangling script that needed UUID generation. With Perl, I used App::Fatpacker to embed UUID::Tiny to make the script runnable just about anywhere without any extra dependencies, but there is nothing like that for Raku AFAIK and it just didn't seem worth it to do something more complicated.