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Ponie: Perl On New Internal Engine
caseywest writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere within his legendary humorous presentation). Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make existing XS code work. Arthur 'sky' Bergman is sponsored by his employer Fotango to develop Ponie. Currently, a press release and a FAQ are available. More details will be available in due time."
Parrot was in good shape and blazingly fast, last time I spoke to Dan Sugalski.
This is all just a plot to get tickets to YAPC::Europe ;)
And a damn good one too, i'm going. Hope we'll get some scoop on this too
One year has passed since the last YAPC and they defenately confused me enough to make me want to hear The Damian explain it to me all over again, or anyone who understands it for that matter
Funny how he won over the complete hall of coders using only two words: "less chars"
The Perl Foundation announces project Ponie to bridge Perl 5 and Perl 6
Two year investment from Fotango to lead the development of Perl 5 running on top of Parrot.
OSCON 2003, Portland, OR (July 8, 2003) -- The Perl Foundation (TPF) is pleased to announce the formation of the Ponie Project, a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6. The Perl 5 interpreter will be rewritten to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine. This will ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world.
Fotango's two-year commitment will allow Arthur Bergman, a Senior Developer at the company and the main contributor to the Perl 5.8 threading effort, to help TPF coordinate and steer the Ponie project externally with the Perl community and internally within Fotango.
"Ponie changes all the rules. Parrot will be the heart of Perl 6. Bringing Parrot to the heart of Perl 5 is very exciting," said Simon Wardley, Fotango's COO. "Ponie will offer a clear road forward for companies contemplating the Perl 5 to Perl 6 transition."
"Fotango has been working with the Perl community for some time now." said Allison Randal, President of The Perl Foundation. "Ponie is not only important for Perl 5, but for Perl 6 as well. With Fotango's involvement and sponsorship we are confident in the route the Ponie project is taking."
Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language. Perl 6 is currently in the design stage and is coordinated by Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl language, Damian Conway, the author of 'Object Oriented Programming in Perl' and Allison Randal, the president of the Perl Foundation, and Jeff Bates, convicted child molester. Parrot, being coordinated by Dan Sugalski, is the virtual machine designed for dynamic languages that will run the next version of Perl.
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation is a unit of the Yet Another Society (YAS), a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization based in Holland, Michigan. http://www.perl-foundation.org/
Fotango is a creative solutions group providing consultancy on software projects and interior decorating tips. Fotango employs a large number of open source contributors and other homosexuals. Fotango is based in London, UK. http://opensource.fotango.com/
Press Contacts:
Pierre Denis
Fotango Ltd.
+44 (0) 20 7251 7010
press@fotango.com
Allison Randal
The Perl Foundation
170 College Ave.
Suite 230
Holland, MI 49423
allison@perl.org
I don't think I need to mention that Leon Brocard works for Fotango, and that Fotango owns up to adding their share of silly libraries to CPAN.
And now they've gotten to Larry Wall himself.... :-)
So, is there a URL for the State of the Onion talk this year then?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Let's wish them good luck. Until the project completion, we will have to use expensive obfuscators like this one from Stunnix to hide our Perl source code..
Last I heard, Dan Sugalowski said they planned to design Parrot so it could run Scheme code, as well as Python and Ruby, except it wouldn't be able to do continuations (which you need for Scheme). Anyone know more about this?
Also Dan said that Parrot is more suitable for dynamically typed languages like those, while Mono and dot net are better for statically typed, like C# and Java. Anyone know more about that?
...was used by Talibans in their anti-aircraft missile defense system.
If languages are defined by their community, then PHP is not a real language, because the vast majority of PHP coders I have seen are idiots. PHP is coming up alongside VB and Java as the #3 language for web hacks (by hacks I mean people who DO NOT know what they're doing ;-) to learn.
Nor were there ever claims that it was.
Um. There are scads of Perl web development books written by people who DO NOT know what they're doing. And thousands more actual web developers working in Perl who don't know what they're doing as a result. I know. I used to be one of them. Language wars are a waste of time. The original post was probably off-topic, since this is not a general "criticize Perl" thread. Indeed, the sigil change issue has been answered for Perl 6. The sigils will no longer change. However, there are many of us who find the character indicates type characteristic of Perl to be distracting. In a truly OO language, this can only lead to pain and suffering. If Perl OO is to be more than a hack, the sigils have got to go.
In any case, the concerns about context are completely baseless. So what? It's not like context is subjective in Perl. It's just a factor to deal with when programming. It makes the code more expressive with less effort. That's one of the stated goals of Perl: laziness. In this case, it's a great idea. Not one that is perfectly implemented in Perl, necessarily, but nonetheless a fantastic notion.
I do not have a signature
I use sed, awk, vi, and perl the same way I did back then -- as the best damned text processing tools on the planet. Sed, awk, & perl haven't really changed at all.
Sure, there's no reason that I can't continue to use perl the same way I always did. And I don't berate people for using perl's vast capabilities.
But why does this once-elegant and simple tool continue to mutate and grow into the monstrosity it is? Why didn't Larry just start a totally new project? Why didn't perl (at around, say, version 4) just stop growing and simply go into maintenance mode (for example, adapting to larger capacity since memory and disk have grown by leaps and bounds since then)?
I ask an honest question from soneone who's only sat on the fringes of programming. I used (and still use) perl only for basic text massaging. What need does the now-huge perl fill? Do these new-fangled languages like ruby and python fit the same need, just different approaches?
Method of processing duck feet
From the peanut gallery for sure...
I learned Perl in an amateur way in last year and half.
Seems to me after you use it to glue all the cool stuff on a Linux box and web together with Perl, it is way, way beyond a text language. I know I wrote a wicked cool family history program in Perl. Seems like with all the modules, and the fact computers are so fast a scripting language is even quick enough for very nice 2-D graphics, there is more need for a language like Perl than ever before.
I'd say from looking around, that Perl is really way underutilized and highly underated. Seems to me, Perl has only started its journey in life??? Take its normal uses, add some system calls to various Linux programs, use some modules, and Perl could be used alot more than it is perhaps.
Stricly a Bubba non pro IT guy opinion.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
As someone exposed to Perl and not really any other languages, there is one thing I dont get. There are all these complaints about Perl punctuation. Too my eyes, that punctuation makes it far EASIER to understand what a Perl Script is doing. That criticism really confuses me.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
The CLR is perfectly fine for dynamic languages. Both Microsoft and Ximian both independtly offer Basic and Javascript, as an example. They also run quite quickly.
The Java VM, which is very similar to the CLR VM offers a multitude of dynamic languages including Jython, Rhino (javascript), Scheme, Beanshell, just to name a few.
That's the real question. It's been over 2 years and still no implemented exception support, no thread support, opcodes are still changing, no object support. At least with Ponie, the Parrot team with effective leadership by Leo will have a target to aim for. Currently, with the ever changing Perl 6 definition and questionable goal of supporting all major languages, Parrot's design is completely directionless. A Perl 5 implementation will finally give Parrot a concrete target and a footing in reality.
so that Perl 5 can easily target other back-end VMs such as the JVM, CLR, a Scheme VM, Lua or whatever with a single code base. It would very be useful to have in-process Perl 5 language support on many platforms integrated into other languages. This scenario would not be unlike Tk being used as a GUI toolkit for many scripting languages other than its native TCL.
I don't care about backwards compatability (as long as you can have dual installs of perl6 and perl5)
But then watch as web hosting companies charge double for having such dual installs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The original Perl 6 development schedule from 2000:
Forecast
Design finished (end of 2001)
Alpha released (Mayish 2002)
Beta release (Julyish 2002)
Perl 6.0.0 (Octoberish 2002)
What stage are we at now?
Is it there yet? I can't find it.