RE: A plea for a new old language

[Boris Tschirschwitz <address@hidden>]

I wonder what makes Dan worry so much. Just take a look at Larry's
apocalypses and Simon's exegeses. It's pretty obvious that they are not
afraid of pushing the envelope when it comes to new concepts getting used
to might not be an easy ride (sorry, I haven't spent enough time on it to
give good examples).
What I find promising about it is, that there don't seem to be a lot of
Perl users screaming bloody murder, to the contrary they seem to be exited
about it.

Damn Dan, go for it, after all Scheme was one of the first languages
being put on top of parrot--kind of.

------------------------------
Boris Tschirschwitz
University of British Columbia
Mathematics Department

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Dan Sugalski wrote:

> At 10:17 AM -0700 5/7/03, Brent Fulgham wrote:
> >Personally, I think you should just *do* it!  Imagine what a "feather in the
> >cap" you would be creating for advanced languages by introducing such
> >a feature into Parrot....  Plus you would instantly make Parrot so much cooler
> >than any other alternatives.  :-)
>
> This has been a pretty common response (well, except for Shriram :)
> but it suffers from the problem that prompted my initial mail--while
> I *could* do it (and am sorely tempted) I'm not sure I *should* do
> it. The point of Parrot really isn't to put feathers in any cap, it's
> to build an engine to run Perl/Python/Ruby. It's a volunteer
> engineering project and if I put in features that the folks
> volunteering don't understand or are uncomfortable with then there
> will be problems--either the feature that's not understood will rot
> (if it's optional) or folks just won't want to help (if it's
> required). Enthusiasm about the engine may help some folks push past
> the initial resistance, either ignorance of or aversion to some of
> the core concepts, but there's a limit to what I'm comfortable
> pushing.
>
> I may well be too conservative here, so if I can work out a way to
> make it happen I may well do it, but I don't think I'd count on it.
> --
>                                          Dan
>
> --------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
> Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
> dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
>                                        teddy bears get drunk
>