[granular]

The Perl folk are being very bold, IMO. With Parrot and Rakudo, they're saying that you can write code in Perl 6 and utilize libs in other languages (including the CPAN in Perl 5), or you write code in other languages and still have access to all those libraries.

That is, they must be quite confident that Perl 6 is a winner, and that most users won't just write, say, Python, run it on Parrot, and make use of the CPAN from there.

(Please tell me if I'm totally missing the point, but my understanding is that any Parrot-hosted lang can access any other Parrot-hosted lang's libs.)

[donaldc]

Perl (especially Perl 6, if/when it reaches completion) and Python fill very different temperamental niches. They have profoundly different takes on programming, despite their similarities in terms of both being high-level, interpreted languages. So it seems likely that both will be around for a good long while.

If many languages start using Parrot as a VM, it will moderate the current "rich get richer" dynamic of programming language competition. A language leading in the module race will no longer have such a huge advantage. This will help Perl 6 immensely, of course, since it will start out with very few Perl 6 modules. They'll need to get the Perl 5 CPAN modules working on Parrot to compensate, and it is a happy side-effect that this will make these same modules usable by any other languages running on Parrot.

Also, a point the article doesn't mention is that Perl 6 itself is designed to be a mutable language. Going one step beyond the article, why implement a whole new language at all, just to add/try out a new concept? It may be simpler to instead modify the Perl 6 parser (written in Perl 6 of course) to add your new concept to the syntax and semantics of Perl 6.

I love the idea. I just hope there's actually a ready-for-production implementation of Perl 6 running on top of Parrot at some point.