A vision for Parrot

[A.M. Kuchling]

In article <mailman.1036674730.19464.python-list at python.org>,
	Steven D. Arnold wrote:
> There may be difficulties like the ones you bring up, but my feeling is the
> Parrot people ought to go for solving the easy 90 percent of the problem,
> even if it means that little code from any language will work out of the box
> (except perhaps perl6; it is their baby, after all).  

But then Parrot/Python becomes a variant of Python, and you have to
ask why work on one variant and not another?  Why work on
Parrot/Python and not .NET/Python, which would also be a variant?

Months ago I once predicted that Mono (the effort to write a Linux
.NET implementation) would likely founder on the sheer complexity of
duplicating a large and possibly-shifting standard CLR, while Parrot,
which had a seemingly simpler task, would get its first usable version
out more quickly.  Astonishingly, just the opposite has happened; Mono
has been making releases every few months and steadily writing more
add-on libraries, while Parrot has advanced much more slowly.  I'd
like to dust off Mark Hammond's python.NET code, but unfortunately
Mono doesn't yet implement enough of the necessary APIs to support it.

--amk                                                             (www.amk.ca)
HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.
      -- _Hamlet_, I, ii