WTF? (why no alternate implemenations?)

[Ovid]

--- Mike Whitaker <mike at altrion.org> wrote:

> > I'd never heard of it before, either.
> > http://search.cpan.org/~tty/kurila-1.8_0/pod/kurilaintro.pod may be
> > slightly interesting as well.
> 
> This fills me with confidence:
> > KNOWN BUGS
> >
> > Documentation
> >
> > Documention has not been updated for many of the changes mentioned 

> > in this document

I can certainly understand that, but remember that Kurila is basically
a huge experiment.  If you look at Ruby or Python, they both have
multiple forks as people try to achieve different design goals.  Perl,
the "TIMTOWTDI" language, has an "TIOOWTDI" (There Is Only One Way To
Do It) implementation and I think that's a shame.  I'd love to see
people being able to experiment with Perl and have alternate
implementations that target different needs.

While this is an explicit design goal of Perl 6 (and one that's
approached in a far more saner way), it's something that has previously
been difficult to achieve in Perl (anyone remember "Topaz"?).  I think
people being willing and able to experiment is a sign of a healthy
project.

Hell, I'd be ecstatic to work with a stable, supported Perl 5 fork
which had:

  * Lexically scoped autoboxing.
  * Lazy evaluation.
  * Proper signatures.
  * C3.

I want a lot more, but I'd settle for that.  I doubt I'll see this
soon, though.

Cheers,
Ovid

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