Originally, Parrot was a HoaxLanguage, referred to in a 2001 AprilFools day announcement that PythonLanguage and PerlLanguage were going to be merged, under the new name "Parrot" 
*** http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm

Also, it's been adopted as the name for the PerlSix VirtualMachine, which, ironically enough, is slated to support PythonLanguage (among many others)
*** http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-July/016406.html). 

See ParrotCode.
----

As one WikiZen commented, "In a world with InterCal everything is possible."

''Take a look at the BefungeLanguage. :-)''

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Look at this code sample:

	# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
	while left_angle_right_angle:
	if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
		continue_next;
	}
	print dollar_underscore;
	}

Explaining all the effort that went into this joke and is a fun to read
*** http://www.oreilly.com/news/parrotstory_0401.html  

O'Reilly even announced a book about parrot and there was a nice interview with Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum
* O'Reilly's book about Parrot
** ProgrammingParrotInaNutshell
*** http://www.oreilly.com/parrot/ 
** Interview with Larry and Guido
*** http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm 

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''And in a nod to the Monty Python origins of the Parrot name, this was written (after the AprilFools joke but before Parrot became the VirtualMachine project):''

Is there more code? A formal spec? While the above code looks promising,
it is not enough to deduce a complete language spec from.

''You saw the note about 'AprilFools day joke' above? No, there is no spec and probably there won't be more code or a spec in the future.''

But I want to write an interpreter for it, in the gool ol' InterCal
tradition. But of course I want to be sure to implement true blue
Parrot, not some deviant offspring. -- StephanHouben

So I guess this is really a Dead Parrot Language? Or is it just resting?


''How could something be dead or resting if it never has been alive?''

Schroedinger's Parrot?

The parrot is not dead, it's pining for the fjords.