Yey, after a pause caused by covid and war, I am back to full speed. I am happy to announce that the Raku Course is now ready: https://course.raku.org.

All the planned items are there. On top of that there are some improvements to the original plan. More on what's new: https://andrewshitov.com/2026/07/15/the-complete-course-of-the-raku-programming-language/

The most exciting addition is probably an online Raku playground, which can serverlessly handle a big portion of Raku right in a browser.

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Does concept of junctions in Raku remind anyone of math. concepts of semilattice?

At first I noticed they *look* like semi lattice.

any/all are associative, commutative, and idempotent \[any($x, $x) collapses to $x\]

Maybe even bounded lattice:

any as join, all as meet + and De Morgan duality via none layered on top.

I was exploring some algebraic structures for not on a surface level. Even though I haven't used Raku extensively, junctions were very interesting because they exhibited some semilattice properties.

https://dev.to/lizmat/governance-and-the-raku-foundation-1b6b

"Last year I started learning Raku, and the sheer bizarreness of the language left me describing it as a language for gremlins. Now that I've used it in anger for over a year, I have a better way of describing it: 'Raku is a laboratory for language features.' This is why it has five different models of concurrency and eighteen ways of doing anything else, because the point is to see what happens. It also explains why many of the features interact so strangely and why there's all that odd edge-case behavior. Getting 100 experiments polished and playing nicely with each other is much harder than running 100 experiments ... "

Hillel Wayne, "Five Unusual Raku Features", November 12, 2024 https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/five-unusual-raku-features/

The Raku Study Group

Sunday July 12, 2026, 1pm in California, 9pm in the UK

An informal meeting: drop by when you can, show us what you've got, ask and answer questions, or just listen and lurk.

Perl and programming in general are fair game, along with Raku,

Information about upcoming meetings can always be found here:

https://github.com/doomvox/raku-study/blob/main/README.md

https://blogs.perl.org/users/damian_conway/2026/07/trf-lives.html

This is a string comparison algorithm that counts matches/mismatches as well as deletions/insertions (with affine penalty), all four weights are real numbers (the first one is usually positive, the others are negative).

I just followed the german (sadly there is no other one) Wikipedia entry https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotoh-Algorithmus . Then I had asked Perplexity to add backtrace functionality (which seems to work, but I don't yet really understand what happens in there). The code is at https://github.com/ralfmuschall/Gotoh . The README.md explains what I know.

I just uploaded my https://github.com/ralfmuschall/factor-ecm-edwards/tree/master . At the moment it is a toy version, but one can already play with it. My long-term goal is to clean up the main routine in such a way that it can be offered for inclusion into Math::NumberTheory.

"Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty."

-- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light" (1967)

The Raku Study Group

Sunday June 21, 2026 1pm in California, 9pm in the UK

An informal meeting: drop by when you can, show us what you've got, ask and answer questions, or just listen and lurk.

Perl and programming in general are fair game, along with Raku,

Information about upcoming meetings can always be found here:

https://github.com/doomvox/raku-study/blob/main/README.md