I think I agree with you in spirit, that we should have high expectations for Parrot and hopefully make the scripting
languages that we are running more realistic as all-around programming languages.
Eh, I think you should cross out the "hopefully". It is Larry's intention for Perl 6 to be a language for the next 30 years (IIRC). I doubt he meant it as just another "scripting" language.
Lets not be unrealistic. Certain language features inherently make compile time (and run-time)
optimizations hard or impossible. Perl 6 happens to have quite a handful of them so it is no
surprise to me that we find we always seem to be a few cycles shy of certain traditional
static languages.
I see Parrot as an effort to
close the gap between Perl/Python/Ruby and C#/Java on the exact same hardware, since significant advancements in
execution speed by the Java and C# implementations are pretty unlikely. (They are already pretty fast)
I think you are thinking too short term in that respect. ;-)
Don't assume that because my opinion differs from your own that it means I think in less grand scale than
you do. :)
It is much too early to decide if a particular optimization towards single-threadness necessarily
hurts anything and there is certainly no reason to assume Parrot/Perl6 won't run threaded
applications well just because Perl5's ithreads don't.
-Melvin
