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in reply to Re: Perl myths ?
in thread Perl myths ?
Actually, I very much hope that I can use Python and Ruby alongside Perl6 via Parrot. In fact, I'd love to see a version of a Java compiler that can target Parrot, too. That way I can choose each language based on its merits alone and not just because it needs to integrate with a larger application that is written only in language x.
I doubt Cobol is going away any time soon. If you've still got Cobol code laying around, it's because it's mission critical and you don't dare replace it with a solution that doesn't have 20+ years of debugging behind it like your current Cobol code does. You don't keep Cobol around because you want to, but because you have to. I don't see how Parrot will change that.
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Re: Re: Re: Perl myths ?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Feb 22, 2004 at 21:12 UTC
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There likely will be a version of a Java compiler that can target Parrot. However Parrot does not consider all languages equal. It considers highly dynamic languages as first class citizens, and all other languages will pay overhead whether or not it makes sense for them. This means that Java running on Parrot will be far slower than Java running on a traditional JVM.
Therefore while it is an interesting proof of concept, people will only run Java on Parrot if they really, really have to. | [reply] |
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You're definitely right about the (probably huge) speed loss, but don't forget that parrot-compiled languages will be able to use each other's libraries. So, even though I couldn't imagine anyone running a pure-java app on parrot, I could see a lot of people wanting to take advantage of the huge number of Java libraries out there.
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I'm more likely to want to take advantage of perl libraries from within Java. I have no doubt that there are a lot of high-quality Java libraries available, but finding them is made too hard because there's no JPAN.
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Re: Re: Re: Perl myths ?
by flyingmoose (Priest) on Feb 22, 2004 at 18:01 UTC
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FYI -- my comments on Cobol were about a language that had no room to go. I did not imply that Perl was going to some how take share from Cobol, or Forth.
I wanted to mention Lisp and Smalltalk as languages that weren't really growing too -- but many folks still use those. Plus, I was trying to avoid a flamewar with any AI professors that might post here :) It's blatantly obvious TONS of folks still use Cobol.
Languages never really die. They just cease to grow. That's what I meant when discussing Cobol and Forth.
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Considering COBOL was one of the first major languages to be ported to .NET, I would really hesitate to say that is has "no room to grow". Don't get me wrong I have no love for COBOL, but i think that COBOL.NET and all the work done modernizing COBOL during the Y2K "crisis" have actually given it a lot of "room to grow". Sure, the hacker community isn't gonna start writing COBOL versions of Slash and COBOL-nuke or anything, but it a language that was designed for business managers not programmers, and who knows, business managers may cause a revivial (oh lord I hope not), dumber things have been done in the name of commerce.
To say too that FORTH has no room to grow, hmmm, FORTH being FORTH, and therefore being (just about) infintely extensible. I would really hesitate to say that. There are likely more dialects of FORTH out there than grains of sand on a beach. As long as there are electrical engineers and micro-code, there will likely be some form/derivative of FORTH.
Now as for LISP, oh boy, again the language is so extensible that it would never cease to have "room to grow". Take Paul Graham for instance, he wrote the original engine for Yahoo! Stores in LISP (see this for some detail). LISP begat Scheme too, which is used in a lot of places to teach CompSci. LISP (and dialects of LISP) is also the primary language used by Cycorp, which recently got some big DARPA contracts to build "terrorist information databases" and "threat anaylsis tools" (I will not get into politics here, but suffice to say this is some of the coolest and scariest stuff out there right now).
I will agree with you that Smalltalk is kinda "lost in the woods" and seems to maybe have lost some of its old footholds to Java. But it still remains a favorite amoung researchers, so one never knows what will happen.
Languages never really die. They just cease to grow. That's what I meant when discussing Cobol and Forth.
But if they are still alive, and if enough smart people are still using them (sometimes against thier will), they will always grow. COBOL had to grow of we would have been fixing the Y2K problem with punchcards instead of modern IDEs.
-stvn
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Re: Re: Re: Perl myths ?
by jryan (Vicar) on Feb 22, 2004 at 21:27 UTC
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I released a partially finished JVM -> PASM translator to the p6-i mailing list several months ago. It was mostly complete as far as opcodes are concerned, but I couldn't really test it as parrot didn't have real object support at the time. Of course, it does now, so maybe I *should* finish it...
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