Crank up this week’s theme song — Horse Outside by the Rubberbandits — and settle in. Big week. We welcomed a new committer, shipped three brand-new libraries, and put out ten releases across five projects. There’s also a persistent HashMap bug fix that enabled json-ng to drop its custom null type, three new Pony patterns, and a blog post about teaching Claude to write Pony.
I’m not really sure how to tell the story of me teaching Claude to write Pony, so I’m just going to tell it and see how it goes.
A year ago, every LLM I tested on Pony produced the same thing: a weird Python/Pony hybrid that didn’t compile and didn’t understand Pony’s semantics. I’d ask for a program that prompts you for your name and prints “Hello {name}.” Simple stuff. They all failed miserably. So when I sat down two weeks ago to try again with Claude Code, my expectations were modest.
Crank up this week’s theme song — George Jones doing “Hey Good Lookin’” — and settle in. Read fast, though. It’s not a long song and this week’s issue is longer than most. We’ve got thirteen releases across six projects. Major new versions of ponylang/ssl, ponylang/lori, and ponylang/ponyup, plus a preview of what’s been piling up in ponylang/postgres.
Busy week on the release front. Ponyc 0.60.6 squashes several compiler bugs that were crashing instead of giving you error messages, Alpine support got bumped to 3.23, and seantallen-org/msgpack landed a big update with streaming support and compact encoding.
There’s a new Pony available. It has a number of bug fixes and ships with a vastly improved language server. We suggest you upgrade soon.
There’s a Pony release coming next weekend—get ready—there’s lots of good stuff in it.
Not a lot of visible activity this week in Pony land, but there’s a lot going on and you can expect a few things to land in the not-so-distant future.
Sorry for the long delay between issues of Last Week in Pony. Life got in the way. I was down with the flu for several weeks. Then I fell out of rhythm and forgot a couple times that I write this thing up on Sundays.