[Copying ESR in, because some of this is All His Fault.]
On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 05:27:36PM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> My problem is, I don't know any of the folks who are currently
> working on the Parrot project personally, and I am having a hard
> time figuring out how serious you all are about supporting Python.
OK. I can only speak for myself here; other people's opinions may differ.
Parrot is going to be the runtime for Perl 6, so obviously we need to make
Perl 6 support a priority. However, I *firmly* believe that our design is
sufficient that we can do that in a way that does not compromise the ability
for other languages to be ported to Parrot and to run correctly and
efficiently. I also firmly believe that if we *do* compromise the ability for
other languages to do that, there's a bug in our design.
Unfortunately, I'm kinda stuck in a little bit of a vicious circle; the only
people hammering out Parrot's design are Perl people, and we can miss, gloss
over or completely dismiss some subtleties which would make it difficult for
other languages to run on Parrot - whether it be huge things like the concept
of an object, or (comparatively) tiny things like how to name integer types.
So I worry that our design is going to end up Perl-centric without us even
knowing it. But rest assured, I really, really, really don't want that to
happen. (Otherwise, I wouldn't be worrying about it. :)
So, yeah, I'm *very* serious about it.
> I know Larry well enough to trust him, but Nat, and Dan, and
> Simon, are all just email addresses to me, and I have no idea what
> the relationship is between you all and Larry.
I'll be honest and say I don't know Larry that well; I'm a comparative (in
this context, this means "only" 3 years) newcomer to the Perl community, and
am still stunned at having my mails taken seriously by people like Larry and
yourself.
This is just an off-chance thing, but it would be good if we could get some
face time at this MIT conference thing coming up (or some other time,
naturally) so you can reassure yourself I'm not the raging asshole I appear to
be on mailing lists. (Or at least, I hope not.) I secretly hoped we could do
that at OSCon, but I appreciate you had infinitely more important business to
being then. :) (Congratulations, by the way; hope things are going well.)
> In addition, I find it hard to believe that you all aren't talking to
> Larry at all -- some coordination between the language design and the
> back-end design must be necessary.
Yep, we are, and we're working quite closely with him. However, and I'm going
out on a limb here because I don't know for sure if this is true, but I get
the feeling that Larry is trying to take a back seat in Perl 6, restricting
himself to the language design, to get fresh blood in and to reduce the
getting-hit-by-a-bus problem. So that's why you get to deal with us instead.
:)
That being said, I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't do any *harm* for Larry
to pop you an email across.
Simon
--
`After all, we're not all freaky perverts' - Thorfinn
