I'm not sure of Dan's exact reasons for being upset. I know that he's been irritated in the past at people who hang around and try to look cool while doing nothing. I know that he's been running the project for 5 years, and that is a long time to do anything. I know that the system they are trying to build suffers from some second syndrome tendancies.

Parrot is not widely used anywhere, of course, but according to reports that I've seen it is mature enough to build real languages on it. But I have to admit (as someone who hasn't played with it) that I'd question whether I'd want to run production stuff on it. Nobody seems to be using it for production yet, and periodically there are major design changes.

The core Perl developer community is not the easiest to interact with. As with all open source projects, you take what you get, which isn't always what you want. I think that it is better than it was a few years ago when p5p was a constant flamewar.

The project itself is still ticking along. See [link|http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/p6pdigest/20050602.html|http://www.perl.com/...est/20050602.html] for details. Atrijus Tang suggests that a useable Perl 6 could be real by Christmas. Of course the way that it finally happened is 90% due to Atrijus, Haskell, and various design documents that people wanted to make real. It is perhaps 10% due to Parrot. (Parrot is only one of several back ends, though hopefully it will be the best-performing.)

Cheers,
Ben