Dan Sugalski Flies Away To a Place Where Parrot Cannot #
Nearly four five years into development of Parrot, its creator, Dan Sugalski, has left the team completely. Who knows how this bodes for the Parrot project. I’m not one who can call a bird “vaporous” when said bird has accumulated nearly 220,000 lines of code. In fact, the April Fool’s Joke Turned Sweetest Software Mirage Ever had a 0.2.1 release on the very same day. So.
The landscape of software is littered with failed projects. I wouldn’t say Parrot is a failed project. More like a jet-black hovercraft that you see all the time on cable TV but can’t ever actually get your hands on. But, hey, it was still pretty cool to see on TV, huh? Best wishes to Dan and hopefully the work of the Parrot team, should it never come to fruition amongst the commoners, will be the grounds for other virtual machines or future incarnations of Parrot.
And here’s to hoping ko1 comes back soon. (Oh, and I saw this one on good ol’ anarchaia.)
riffraff
actually, ko1 just stepped back, giving us a x4 speed up for case/when :)
Ian Bicking
Kind of a shame. Perl 6 always seemed like a truly horrible idea (from a development viability point of view), but Parrot seemed like it had some real potential (strategically—I don’t know much about its development process). There’s other environments for building cross-language environments, like the CLR or JVM , but dynamic languages are an afterthought there, and their development process is also not very good, since they are driven by proprietary interests.
A VM meant for dynamic languages, implemented in an open process, targetting the major open source dynamic languages, seems like it could be really important, that it could bring about some really significant changes in the larger software environment.
Phil
Let’s not bury the bird prematurely. I’d say it’s a bit early to break out the shoe box and garden shovel. My anonymous sources tell me that Parrot is in good hands.
Actually, isn’t Parrot fairly usable even now? (not complete, of course, but usable)
As far as Perl 6 being a horrible idea: Well, they had to do something. Perl 6’s grammars look kind of enticing, actually.
riffraff
perl6 started out being quite interesting, but it seem to me it has become more kitchen sinkish than is acceptable. Anyway, talking about parrot, I just noticed this ruby+eiffel inspired language targeting parrot
Dan
FWIW , it was nearly five years, not four. This whole thing started in the summer of 2000…
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