[tpm] New Parrot release!! .... one year since last update :-)

[zoffix at zoffix.com]

Quoting Abuzar <abuzar at abuzar.com>:

> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 6:06 PM, <zoffix at zoffix.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Quoting Abuzar <abuzar at abuzar.com>:
>>
>> Last update was Feb 16, 2016, one year ago.
>>> Side ticker says they're still meeting every week.
>>>
>>> Here's the release announcement:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE
>>>
>>
>> MoarVM is what the kids use these days: http://moarvm.com/
>>
>> Next release coming up in less than 24 hours ;)
>>
>>
> Yes, I know, and it's quite sad.  I feel that between Rakudo, Moarvm, and
> Parrot, priority should've gone to parrot.

I know little about that era in Perl 6's history, but looking at the Wiki
for Parrot, it was in development since at least 2005 and was taking its
last breaths mid 2015. In 10 years, it failed to deliver anything usable.

MoarVM on the other hand, was started in 2012 and by 2015—in just 3
years— allowed the first stable release of Perl 6. People love to say
that Perl 6's long development time killed Perl, but looking at these dates,
it seems like the delay was because people were trying to create a
Rosetta Stone of Virtual Machines.

> The particular way in which Moarvm took over from Parrot, from the articles
> that I read online, it left a bad impression in me.  It didn't sound nice,
> it made me feel uncomfortable and lose trust in the development team.

Considering Mr. Chromatic still trolls core devs to this day, I imagine what
you say is true.

> Having many languages use the same free/open/collaborative virtual machine
> and inter-operate with each other and/or libraries written on different
> platforms is a very important goal that shouldn't have been abandoned
> (reading some part of the moarvm docs, I understand that it was
> intentionally abandoned).

I didn't realize that was Parrot's actual goal. Yes, it was intentionally
abandoned in MoarVM, based on some slides I saw, which IMO is a good idea.
Older parts of Rakudo's code are horribly over-engineered and perhaps
Parrot's apparent ideal of trying to be everything to everyone infected
Rakudo and Perl 6. All of a sudden, the existence of this meme makes  
sense to me:
https://hbfs.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/perl6book-parody.jpg?w=600&h=1000

> I feel like what folks were trying to accomplish
> with parrot is the natural direction that the mindset of programming in
> Perl takes.  Not having that, feels like something crucial is missing from
> the perl experience, and specifically the Perl 6 development era in Perl's
> journey.
>
> This whole JS thing has filled some of that gap, and the way it's being
> done is very corporate and puke-worthy.  This is the task that should've
> been done with Perl, and specifically Parrot.  If it had played out that
> way, I think we'd be seeing a different landscape in tech.
>
> I feel that if a compromise had to be made between resourcing Perl 6 or the
> Parrot project, then it should've been Parrot, because the world needs
> Parrot a lot more than it needs Perl 6.

If it was so much more badly needed, why has its development stalled? By far
the most contributions to Perl 6 are done by volunteers, for free, with full
freedom to make a choice what to contribute to. It doesn't look like there
were any resourcing compromises made. MoarVM just solved the problems Parrot
had and came out ahead because it was better suited for the task at hand.

Survival of the Fittest.