RE: A plea for a new old language

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

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