The Raku Programming Language Collect, Conserve and Remaster Project
Originally published on 2012-10-03 by Jonathan Worthington.
Three years ago I paid a visit to Japan to attend YAPC::Asia. It was also my first time in Japan, and so in addition to a very enjoyable and well attended Perl conference, I got to enjoy the incredible Japanese cities, the beautiful nature, great food (and this is coming from somebody who can’t eat fish and seafood – yes, there are still plenty of nice things to eat) and some of the most polite and pleasant people I’ve come across anywhere. I’m still a bit mystified what made me leave coming back again a whole three years – but it goes without saying that I’m very glad I did. Japan is as awesome as I remembered. :-)
Naturally, Raku has come a long way since I was last here. Last time, I talked about Raku at the level of interesting snippets of code that you could run that solved small problems. These days, with the language having a growing ecosystem of modules and compilers capable of running them, it felt natural to focus on that. Thus, my talk was Exploring Raku Through Its Modules. The code in it is really nothing new to those who have followed Raku very closely; it just shows off various modules along with some annotations and explanations of how they put Raku to good use. Many people don’t follow along so closely, however, so I think for most people attending the talk had quite a bit of new and interesting stuff.
Of all the Perl events I’ve been to, YAPC::Asia is by a long way the biggest. This year, once you counted speakers in, there was over 800 people there! That’s incredible for a community-organized conference, and the organizers did a great job of making it happen. Also impressive is that they got the videos of the talks up really soon afterwards – so you can even watch my talk! I suggest having the PDF of the slides too for easier following.
Anyway, I’ll now get on with enjoying the Japanese countryside for a few days before returning to Sweden and resuming life as normal. Maybe I’ll even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Fuji, :-)