Now that some time has passed, and much work continues to be done on Perl6 and Parrot, I've been trying to think through how Parrot will affect a variety of issues. I reviewed many threads here on PM, as well as looked through a variety Googled resources and found mostly discussion of the internals, scoping and other issues related to the creation of Parrot itself, which makes total sense at this stage of development.

Mostly, since I'm not a CS grad or have other Deep Knowledge of many things, I seem to be focusing on the eventual gains that might be possible from the application level. What are some Big Picture possibilities? I thought it would be interesting to hear what more experienced Perlminds might say.

This usually leaves me thinking that Parrot will likely:

• Facilitate distributing bytecode (no source code) and a VM if needed, and;
• Probably(?) result in faster execution speeds.

I'm guessing that as I come to understand more about Perl6, other things will occur to me.

But this leaves me in wait-and-see mode (and probably rightly so) and I'd rather be thinking more clearly about what the potentials are.

1. Will Parrot make it easier to plan and create distributable applications with a smaller footprint and faster-than-java execution speed on the average x86 box?
2. Will any monks begin to architect desktop or client-server applications that they've not considered they could easily do (in Perl) before?
3. etc...

So, in the spirit of meditating about the future, a few questions spring to mind that I hope you won't mind commenting on.

Where's the application-level sweet spot most likely to be in designing and implementing for Parrot? Language specifics or internals aren't really on my mind in this question.

What thoughts have you had about how Perl6/Parrot will actually affect your work and projects? Will the runtime engine become invaluable for you in any fundamental (or killer app) way?

And philosophically (and possibly rhetorically): Since Parrot will be extensible to allow runtime use by many languages, is this the logical extension of "glue language" philosophy applied to the now separate VM? Is Parrot the result of many Secret Meetings in order to conquer the world with a Unified Language Theory in practice? :) If Parrot succeeds on a grand scale, will it take on a life of its own and no longer be necessarily associated with Perl itself?

Ultimately, I suppose I'm looking for what you're thinking some of the opportunities may be. What are you anticipating doing with Parrot that somehow wasn't possible, or feasible, before?

TIA

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