[Python-Dev] Parrot -- should life imitate satire?

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 04:16:49PM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>impact on reusability of the runtime.  The bytecode engine cannot be
>considered independent from the rest of the runtime.

If you must have a portable bytecode format, why not use the JVM?
Perhaps it's not optimal, but it works reasonably well, has a few
reasonably complete free implementations that are mostly strangling
due to lack of manpower, has some support in GCC 3.0, and is actually
deployed in browsers and on people's systems *right now*.  I fail to
see why we should run after some mythical Perl/Python bytecode that
would have to be 1) designed 2) implemented 3) debugged 4) actually
made available to users 5) actually downloaded by users.  (Much the
same objections apply to .NET for Unix.)

There's also the cultural difference between Python's "write it
clearly and then optimize it" and Perl's "let's write clever optimized
code right from the start".  Perhaps this can be bridged, perhaps not.

--amk