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."

Could anyone please explain why?

[Deagol]

Don't get me wrong -- I fell in love with perl ten years ago. I bought myself a handful of O'Reilly books that began my journey as a competant unix admin: Learning Sed and Awk, Learning Vi, and Learning Perl. Each book seemed to naturally lead to the other. While the first two have each had one update since then, the perl book had three (I think).

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?