You forget its financial and platform availability merits - it is free

I can get a JVM and a CLR for free (as in beer). I don't see cost as an issue.

and should run *anywhere* Perl5 runs - which is any platform that can run C

Which is, of course, cool.

Unfortunately having many platforms only helps in the commercial world if they are platforms that the commercial world is interested in. The JVM runs on platforms that Perl doesn't run on that just happen to be platforms that commercial folk find attractive.

Take mobile phones for example. Nokia will be shipping over 400 million mobile devices with the JVM on this year. Convincing everybody that they should support Parrot too will, I think, be tricky.

BTW, the list is asking for volunteers all the time. Infact, there were 2 calls for help today, and They are always looking for testers

Some tuits! Some tuits! My kingdom for some tuits! :-)

I have the greatest respect for the Parrot and Perl 6 developers. Perl 6 is an interesting language. Parrot is going to be a really great technical platform (I'm really looking forward to implementing Prolog on Parrot when the Spare Time Fairy next visits :-)

However, I've seen other interesting languages and great technical platforms fail to get broad acceptance. I just hope Perl 6/Parrot won't join them.