Why, thank you for volunteering, Stephen! Tell us when it's ready on CPAN... ;-)

Right now, we're still in the marketing-frenzy stage. Nobody knows quite for sure what “it” is, but everybody knows that “it” is sure to be the Next Best Thing Since Dot-BombCom. Whatever that means... In other words, we're not yet really at a point that has anything to do with engineering. Stock-market speculators must have their day first.

In a year or two, I think, and probably not any sooner, we'll start to have a mature and competitive marketplace for computing and storage capacity. (There's a “geographically mis-placed oversupply” of both, which of course means potential opportunity.) But we're just not there yet. A whole lot of trial-and-error is going to be taking place, and there's quite a lot to be said for not trying to be too much of an early-adopter. Methinks...

Neither Perl nor any other mainstream language will be excluded, quite of necessity. That much we know. But “mister market's recognition that there could be a future opportunity here” is not necessarily a starting-gun. The open-source way of “do it and share it” means that we will not be out-of-the-running at any point at all. Someone (you?) will “build it, and we will come.” If you have a well-defined idea of what the need is, I'm sure you can organize a project and find plenty of willing and knowledgeable contributors lurking near here.