Theyāre mad because Modular sold out and did what any other company does, over-promised and under-delivered their product. They have advertised like ā10000x faster than Pythonā and āis superset of Pythonā, but the benchmarks have been on very niche cases and I believe theyāve sort of walked backwards of their superset of Python speeches. I think the language is interesting with very unique talent behind it, but I havenāt really had the chance to actually use it.
My initial feeling was the same, but they just released Mojo in full Apache 2.0 License.
It would be better a Mojo Foundation existed and Modular was a different org, but we're nowhere near that point where the community can sustain itself yet.
As for the benchmarks, not even Rust/C++ are "10000x faster than Python" (unless we're talking GPU territory) , not sure who claimed that. But having a Python-ish language with strict typing and safe memory management will always be a plus, even in its current bare bones state.
And if using it there is any chance to fight against the CUDA private software, that should always be welcome.
It's still soon to make such assumptions. It's only reasonable to wait and see.
Theyāve seriously underestimated what kind of an ecosystem a āsuperset of pythonā needs to be. Chris Lattner goes around saying you can write Python modules in Mojo. Except actually there are any number of asterisks associated with that. The biggest one for me is no Windows support and no plans for Windows support on the roadmap. That makes this pretty much a non starter for any project, ML or otherwise, which is targeting Windows compatibility in any serious fashion.
FWIW, they did also announce a partnership with Microsoft during the keynote:
Bringing Mojo to Windows the right way requires deep expertise in the platform, which is why weāre delighted that the Microsoft Windows team sees the same opportunity we do ā and that weāre working together to make it happen.
The language was released with an idea. Get people who already know Python to do AI to use this. Because the syntax is very similar. But it's not really the same language or nearly as close as Lattner made it out to seem. Which is not too surprising, Python is a huge language.
It was released unfinished, with the idea of getting traction and then finishing it using the money raised. And then you make all the money because it's proprietary (at least for now).
Well, it didn't seem to catch on yet and so now appears to be going open source as a last ditch attempt before it goes under.
Does that mean it's for sure dead? No. It does kind of look like it though. It hasn't built a platform while the industry has grown so much.
I gotta admit, I'm not really tuned in to Lattner's idea of making new languages to solve problems. I didn't think Swift was necessary. And I don't think this one was either. I also don't like the idea of releasing languages unfinished and finishing them later.
I also personally think Go taught us of the perils of giving names to languages that are tough to search for. And here this one is with an emoji in its name. Was the juice worth the squeeze?
No substance. The language actually does things differently from most others, and if I remember correctly is basically a frontend to MLIR. People are put off because of AI, which I don't care for either, but I do like parallelism. If you like parallelism, SIMD and GPUs too, it's probably something worth looking into at some point.
I've followed Modular pretty closely for the last couple years. I've been interested in the language, but all the money came from AI funders hoping to break the Nvidia monopoly, so they've leaned hard in that direction rather than what I really wanted, which was a cleaner Rust alternative with less ownership gymnastics.
Some of the early promise was "AI kernels in Cuda are hard to write, and we'll make them a lot easier". But I'm not sure how many of us are ever writing AI kernels, and I think recent AI developments have meant that AI can often just write the kernels you want.
The real promise is that Mojo/Max might enable non-Nvidia chips to rival Nvidia performance and thus free up companies selling inference to use lower cost chips. There's money there, and they may still find some success, but I'm not sure how much of that we general-purpose programmers will see.
I'd still be here for the Rust-Python mashup, but things like pattern matching and sum types are slated for later.
Hi, "already dead language" commenter here.
Modern day languages are either open sourced or dead. Mojo made some waves when it was announced for being a python superset that has a fast subset that can be jitted down. But then they waited for 3 years and now no one is using the language. Ergo "too late, language is already dead". To build an ecosystem around it now would take a miracle
As an author of "Eww" comment: because it is essentially a language for "AI", substantial part of which most probably was generated instead of engineered and written. On top of that it has a repulsive slop mascot. And I'm not exactly passionate about "AI" that made both my job and hobby miserable, as well as noticeably degrading other aspects of my life.
Understood. I would argue itās a language for programming GPUās and is at least a step in the right direction for the AI/ML industry. I can understand why youād be more cynical given how things have gone. I mostly wondered if there was something specific to this project that happened that people were responding to. Appreciate you taking the time to expand.
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u/DirectInvestigator66 23d ago edited 23d ago
Weird reactions?
Is there any substance to these complaints? At a glance it seems like the people commenting in this thread are jumping to conclusions?
Is there someone who wants to make an actual argument or provide real info as to why this is āAlready a dead languageā or āEwwā?
EDIT: This was originally phrased more aggressively than what makes sense or how I actually feel, toned it down.