2024 – Raku Advent Calendar

The 2024 Raku Advent Posts

(in chronological order, with comment references)

How time flies. Yet another year has flown by. 2024 was a year of changes, continuations and preparations. Let’s start with the changes: Edument Edument Central Europe, the branch of Edument that is based in Prague (and led by Jonathan Worthington), decided to stop (commercial) development of its Raku related products: Comma (the IDE for the Raku ProgrammingContinue reading “Day 25 – Raku 2024 Review”

Day 24 – In Search of the Essence of Raku

Amongst all of its features, what do we consider to be the essence of Raku? In this advent post we will explore what makes Raku an exciting programming language and see if we can describe its essence. Paul Graham wrote an essay about the 100 year language, back in 2003. In it he had this to say: WhoContinue reading “Day 24 – In Search of the Essence of Raku”

Day 23 – Santa’s Print Shop

A lead-free area Elf Nebecaneezer (‘Neb’) was welcoming some young new workers to his domain and doing what old folks like to do: pontificate. (His grandchildren politely, but behind his back, call it “bloviating.”) “In the old days, we used hand-set lead type, then gradually used ever-more-modern methods; now we prepare the content in PDFContinue reading “Day 23 – Santa’s Print Shop”

Day 22 – Wrapping a Christmas Present

A few months back In the smoke-filled (virtual) room of the council of the high (from the smoke) elves, the wizened textualist Geoff, said “All of my stuff is in boxes and containers.” Empty shelves behind him indicated he was moving house. “When you have a complex module,” Geoff continued, “and its difficult to describeContinue reading “Day 22 – Wrapping a Christmas Present”

Day 21 – Dam Mega Christmas

[Edited by author] Scientists have also discovered that so-called megastructures built by humans can also affect the Earth’s rotation. Take the 185m (about 600 feet) tall Three Gorges Dam. Spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province, Central China, it is the largest dam in the world and is over 2,300m (7,500 feet) in length. ItsContinue reading “Day 21 – Dam Mega Christmas”

Day 20 – Re-introducing a Raku plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

Ever since its release back in the distant universe of 2018, I was a big fan and paying user of Comma IDE. Produced by the lovely folks over at Edument, Comma was both a full-fledged, standalone IDE as well as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA-based IDEs.

Day 19 – Wrapping Scripts

This is a cross post of https://dev.to/patrickbkr/better-wrapper-scripts-158j When creating an application in Raku one will at one point typically hit the issue that the application can only be started by calling raku and passing a few arguments. The usual solution is to write a small wrapper shell script on POSIX and a bat script onContinue reading “Day 19 – Wrapping Scripts”

Day 18 – Happy™ Xmas

Christmas was fast approaching and Santa was starting to worry about all the presents being wrapped in time. Ensuring that he could quickly find the Elfmail address for all of the team was important to whip them into shape. Luckily, Rudolph [for it was he] had been learning raku and cro for some years nowContinue reading “Day 18 – Happy™ Xmas”

Day 17 – Chebyshev Polynomials and Fitting Workflows

This post explores the use of Chebyshev polynomials in regression and curve fitting workflows. It highlights various packages that facilitate these processes, providing insights into their features and applications.