Re: Prothon 0.1.2 is getting close to Alpha [Prothon]

I have been looking over Parrot in consideration as a foundation for
Prothon.  Let me give you some of my thoughts and ask another question or
two.  Feel free to pass this on to any or all on the Parrot team.

Prothon is a small development effort.  While many have been contributing to
the intellectual design, there are only two of us on the development team at
this time.  This means we don't have the luxury of "trying out" Parrot as a
research project on the side.  We need to make a decision to go with Parrot
or not.  So this is a big decision for us.

We have been using the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) as our foundation and
it has been a very pleasant experience.  I have been doing the main
development track in Windows' Visual Studio and it has run on all the other
platforms with barely a hitch.  We would be giving up APR for Parrot.  So
this isn't an argument of homegrown vs. Parrot, it is APR versus Parrot.

Now let me ask you about my concerns.

1) The talks I read on the site mentioned many exiciting features to come
like parsing and optimizing for different languages.  These talks are two
years old and it doesn't seem to me like there has been any progress in the
two years since the talks were given.  What progress has been made in the
last two years?  What is the current schedule for Perl 6?  How realistic is
that schedule?  What is the schedule for a real library?  How realistic is
that schedule?  How many developers are actively contributing to Parrot
every week?

2) I downloaded the CVS tree and I couldn't find any build instructions for
windows.  I didn't look very hard but I couldn't find any C files.  I saw a
lot of .pod files.  What are those?  The faq said Parrot was written in C.

3) Is there someone on the develpment team who could hold my hand in the
beginning to get me going with Parrot in Visual Studio?  After a brief
period I'm sure I could not only stand on my own but I could become a main
support point for Parrot on win32/VS.

If you don't mind, let me make a quick sales pitch.  Prothon has been
developed by some of the top Python minds and is turning out to be an
superior alternative to the mythical Python 3.  Don't let the
prototype-based versus class-based stuff confuse you. Prothon can do
everything Python can do including class-based designs.  Check out the
Prothon tutorial and mailing list archives.  I think you will be hearing a
lot more about Prothon as time goes on.