Just off the heels of the Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon, which focused very much on Parrot, I have a great interview with Chip Salzenberg. Chip is a past Perl 5 Pump King and is the current Parrot Pump King.

Parrot, as many of you know, is a virtual machine that is intended be a platform for running Perl 6. Actually, the Parrot virtual machine hopes to run many languages other than Perl 6. There is currently beginning implementations of many languages on Parrot including Ruby and TCL. Parrot is different than many other virtual machines that we know of. It is register-based, as opposed to the common stack-based architectures, and it is designed to run dynamic languages.

Listen to hear what Chip has to say about the state of Parrot and what you can do to help out.

• Interview Audio
• Parrot
• Perl Hack-a-thons

Kirsten Jones of Socialtext talked with us here at Perlcast about the REST API beta available now on thier wiki. Socialtext is a company based around a powerful wiki written largely in Perl. The wiki was recently open sourced and is available for download at SourceForge.

• Interview Audio
• Socialtext OPEN on Sourceforge
• Invitation to REST Beta

Bill Odom, President of The Perl Foundation, sat down with me at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop to talk a little about The Perl Foundation and how it is helping to support Perl and the Perl community. In the interview Bill talks about a wide range of topics including how he sees TPF helping drive the continued success and adoption of Perl as a programming language for years to come.

• Interview Audio
• The Perl Foundation
• TPF Blog

Perlcast is here with the first of many podcasts recorded at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention 2006. This first interview was with Patrick Michaud. Patrick is the author of PGE, the parrot/Perl6 Grammar engine and is also the Perl 6 compiler pumpking.

• Interview Audio
• Perl 6
• Parrot
• Synopsis 5: The Ideas For PGE

After quite a break for YAPC, house guests, and getting a new place, Perlcast is back with another great interview. This interview is with Andy Hunt of the The Pragmatic Programmers. In the interview Andy discusses some topics covered in the book “Practices of an Agile Developer”.

• Interview Audio
• The Pragmatic Programmers