Surely we'll wake up in the morning and find this has been a clever case of April Fool's Tomfoolery :) Simon Cozens wrote: > > [Note: I've been asked to release this as editor of www.perl.com; I'll give > my *personal* opinions on the move later in the day or tomorrow. See also, > however, the feature at http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm > ] > > 04/01/2001 > SEBASTOPOL, CA > > Perl and Python to begin joint development > > Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, and Guido van Rossum, creator of > Python, today announced that their respective projects are about to > begin a period of joint development. > > According to the language designers, the idea surfaced at last year's > Open Source Convention - "We at the Perl Conference were aware of a need > for a new direction for Perl and for its community, and that's why we > announced the work on Perl 6," said an excited Wall. "At the same time, > Guido was thinking very hard about Python 2.0 and where it was going, > and we got together and started talking about helping each other out." > > Initially, the pair planned to have their development communities > working together for mutual benefit. van Rossum cited some of the > technical reasons for the collaboration: "Perl's highly powerful regular > expression engine would be integrated into Python, and would benefit us > greatly; in return, we've got a number of things right that Perl could > gain from, such as signal handling and robust software engineering." > > However, as both designers talked about the changes their languages were > going through, they came to the conclusion that they had much to share > at the language level as well as the interpreter level. According to > Larry Wall, "Perl's always been about taking the best features of all > the other languages available; it's perfectly natural for us to > integrate the best features of Python too." > > The specifications for the combined language, called Parrot, will be > documented in the forthcoming book "Programming Parrot In A Nutshell", > to be published by O'Reilly and Associates. In the meantime, the Python > Software Foundation is said to be making arrangements to merge with Yet > Another Society. YAS president Kevin Lenzo was delighted at the move: > "It's a natural extension of what YAS was set up to facilitate - > collaboration and communication between programming communities." > > Parrot development will begin with the merger of the Py3K development > team with the Perl 6 internals working group; Jeremy Hylton and Dan > Sugalski will be the joint development leads. > > Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum both recently accepted positions at the > Vancouver, Canada development company ActiveState. A spokesman for > ActiveState said that the company was obviously very pleased with the > decision, but denied that ActiveState had influenced it in any way.
