Parrot... is Python dead now?

[Alex Shindich]

I read an article on http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm about a
joint effort between Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum to conceive a new
animal. According to them camel + python = parrot.

I personally have very mixed feelings about this project. 
One the one hand I have always thought that interoperability between P&P
would be a great thing. I even planned (for some time now) to start a
project called "Babylon" to create an interoperability framework for
Python, Perl, and Tcl.
On the other hand, the new language scares me... The biggest reason of all
is that I am deeply in love with Python's syntax. After all, Perl and
Python are roughly equivalent in what they offer to the programming
community. But I could never bring myself to learn Perl's ugly syntax. I
love the fact that Python syntax can be easily read by people who know
nothing but BASIC -- the syntax is simple and natural.

My question is, why can't Parrot be an open virtual machine just like
Microsoft's CLR? That way, both Python source code and Perl source code
would compile down to Parrot byte codes, and Pythonians wouldn't have to
abandon Python's syntax. I understand that Perl could use some syntactical
cleaning up... but why abandon Python? In fact If people like Parrot
syntax, why not have parrot compile to common byte code too?

-- 
Alex Shindich
mailto:alex at shindich.com
Visit http://www.shindich.com/