If Parrot is significantly more embeddable than Perl (and that doesn't take much!), then it will be highly relevant to me. I have a system for which we hope to get 3rd party developers to produce content. When I needed to add a scripting language, I chose Perl because of CPAN and my personal familiarity with it. It has proven to be a major PITA getting it to really work well with C++, and Perl is limiting my potential audience drastically. For applications like this, Parrot would be a lifesaver: better embeddability, and multiple front-end languages.

I suspect we'll see a working Python, Ruby, PHP, or Tcl front-end well before Ponie or Perl6, btw. They're smaller and more regular.

Update: by "regular" I mean the definition "orderly, even, or symmetrical" (from dictionary.com). Fewer exceptions, more orthogonality. Python seems to be built from a small handful of concepts that you constantly reuse and build ever higher towering edifices of abstraction and bothersome structure. Ruby picks a slightly different set of basic constructs, and provides more opportunity to be concise when you want to, but still has fewer special cases and shortcut constructs than Perl. PHP seems to gain regularity by discarding some of the more irregular parts of Perl. Tcl, at least the one I used many years ago before they object-ified the internals, was a tiny, simplistic string-based language. The core language was very regular, although the various things built atop that core were all over the place. But for Parrot, only the core really matters.

Note that I was not using "regular" as a value judgement. I really like many of Perl's irregularities, although (especially when you're implementing or embedding a language) there is a lot to be said for minimalism and regularity too. I don't think Perl has gotten the balance exactly right, nor have I encountered any other language that feels to me that it might.

Sorry for doubling the length of this node with an update, but I wanted to respond to sth's reply, but the response felt more like a clarification than an independent node.

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