Thursday, June 18, 2009

Why Parrot is important, or not..

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7373/1.html

Here's the summary that I got from this...

1. Parrot is neat, you can write languages very quickly and easily.
2. Parrot is a register based VM, which is better than a stack based one.
3. Concurrency is hard, Parrot isn't mentioned as being part of the solution, but if we ever figure it out, why not do it in Parrot so we don't have to do it again and again going forward?
4. Parrot is going up against Microsoft's CLR/DLR, and Sun's JVM. Parrot is forcing their hand to make improvements.

I feel like reading between the lines there is a defeatist attitude in the last three paragraphs, that MSFT and ORCL will just hulk smash Parrot with $$ and Parrot is one big academia project that won't end with a system capable of generating production level code. Seriously, that's ok though, they're doing all this for FREE, they don't owe me anything. I'm just thankful for Perl5, my entire livelihood is based on it, and it's an honor to stand on the shoulders of giants to do what I do.

I've been using what little free time I have to try to learn Perl 6 and Parrot (not exactly easy with our first baby arriving a little over a month ago). I'm not sure I want to invest, literally my future into it anymore. Hence my intrigue over Vala. Being a Perl/Java programmer in the past has got me pretty far, but seeing how I hate Java, I'd better find a decent replacement, and I'm not sure Parrot/Perl6 is it.

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