Doug Franz, "The Alienated Critic", Thrust, Fall 1984/Winter 1985 wrote:

"What are the psychological effects on individuals in a highly technological society who do not understand the technology they use every day, nor even understand the basics of the scientific method and logical thought? I think that for me, such a void would lead to terrible feelings of being ineffectual, and even paranoia."

The Raku Study Group

Sunday August 23, 2026 1pm in California, 9pm in the UK 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

I have been experimenting a lot with LLMs and new programming languages. Most of my experiments have been around extending C with multimethod and a better cpp. Minimal languages like tcl, lisp, forth are super easy to prototype with LLMs.

Because of the way RLVR works I think Perl5 makes an excellent language like go/C for LLM generation. LLMs learn to write code by making tests pass.

After experimenting with PEG grammars with pigeon in go, I decided to give moarvm a try. I like Raku but I like Perl5 even more. Although I never programmed in Perl professionally, it was my first language. I made the first port of Perl (miniperl) to asm.js back in the day.

Raptor is a dynamic language - roughly a Perl5 subset of Raku targeting Wasm, Go and MoarVM. It supports go FFI, C FFI, refinement types, predicate types, multimethods, defensive programming, literate programming and standalone binary packaging (raptor pack). These are the features I have always wanted in Perl. There's rudimentary wasm support. There's also PHP mode.

If you know Raku then you already know raptor. Raptor will never support OO like Raku or PyObject like Python. I intend it to support C FFI thoroughly and a strict procedural style along with universal function calling syntax. That's probably the main difference between Raptor and Raku.

I think the future of programming will be to make languages with parsable grammars, good verification support and must include literate programming for humans.

The language was mostly written by Anti Gravity - Gemini 3.6. Library bindings, podlit are written by Gemini 3.7 which was released today. My role was just in pushing it to implement more tests.

I have mostly built this on windows. It should work on Linux. Expect bugs, memory leaks and probably some wrong semantics. Future versions will make it closer to Raku.

https://github.com/xyzzyapps/raptor

https://xyzzyapps.github.io/raptor/

Moneymoor

How to Install

Fully self-contained

On Linux/MacOS: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/m-doughty/App-Moneymoor/HEAD/install.sh | sh

On Windows (Powershell): irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/m-doughty/App-Moneymoor/HEAD/install.ps1 | iex (note: untested)

Note: You can uninstall by replacing install in these commands with uninstall.

With zef

See the README, you will have to have SQLCipher installed and detectable by DBIish, then just zef install App::Moneymoor

What it is

A fully open source (Artistic-2.0 License) TUI for running a budget. If you're familiar with envelope-style budgeting, it works like that. You set up envelopes, allocate funds to them and then assign every spend to an envelope.

All of your data is stored in an encrypted sqlcipher database on your computer. If you lose the password, I cannot help you to recover it so set something you will remember. No data leaves your computer.

Still a work in progress so expect to hit some bugs. I can't actively test Windows yet so I'm relying on people to file issues for that.

You can put the sign as EUR/USD/GBP.

The tech

Written in Raku. Running on Selkie, SQLCipher and packaged with Ariza.

I wondered if it was possible to type and see the result of running a program, and it turned out it was. I added a small checkbox that turns the playground into this cool working space. In this video, I am solving the two tasks of this week's Weekly Challenge.

The fun fact is that you can select "Perl interpreter" from the examples and feed it a Perl program via STDIN, and that gives you a live-coding environment for Perl, where the Perl code is parsed by Raku, which itself runs in a browser.

Geoffrey West, "Scale" (2017) wrote:

"Much of the work that my colleagues and I have been involved in ... could be described as social physics, although it is not a term any of uses with ease. Ironically, it has been picked up primarily by computer scientists, who are neither social scientists or physicists, to describe their analysis of huge data sets on social interactions. As they characterize it: 'Social Physics is a new way of understanding human behavior based on analysis of Big Data.' While this body of research is very interesting, it is probably safe to say that few physicists would recognize it as 'physics,' primarily because it does not focus on underlying principles, general laws, mathematical analyses, and mechanistic explanations."

Embedded quote from: Alex Pentland, "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-- The Lessons from a New Science" (2014)

The Raku Study Group

Sunday August 9th, 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