RE: A plea for a new old language

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 8:34 AM -0700 5/8/03, Boris Tschirschwitz wrote:
>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.

The worries are different. The stuff Larry's rolling in is almost 
entirely optional--if you don't care about curried functions, 
multimethod dispatch, funky regex syntax, and suchlike things you can 
ignore it all. Requiring CPS for control transfer at the VM level 
makes it kinda hard for folks targeting the VM to avoid it, as not 
actually doing any control transfer sort of limits your options. :)

>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