[amval]

For a language that announced itself (and raised a lot of money on the premise of) claiming to be "a Python superset", this does not sound like a huge achievement.

In all fairness, their website now reads: "Mojo is a pythonic language for blazing-fast CPU+GPU execution without CUDA. Optionally use it with MAX for insanely fast AI inference."

So I suppose now is just a compiled language with superficially similar syntax and completely different semantics to Python?

[Certhas]

I think it was pretty clear immediately that running python code was a far away goal. There was a lot more talk about lifetimes and ownership semantics than details about Python interop. Mojo is more like: Can we take the learnings of Swift and Rust and solve the usability and compile time issues, while building on MLIR to target arbitrary architectures efficiently (and call it a Python superset to raise VC money).

That said, the upside is huge. If they can get to a point where Python programmers that need to add speed learn Mojo, because it feels more familiar and interops more easily, rather than C/CPP that would be huge. And it's a much lower bar than superset of python.

[amval]

It marketed itself explicitly as a "Python superset", which could allow Python programmers to avoid learning a second language and write performant code.

I'd argue that I am not sure what kind of Python programmer is capable of learning things like comptime, borrow checking, generics but would struggle with different looking syntax. So to me this seemed like a deliberate misrepresentation of the actual challenges to generate hype and marketing.

Which fair enough, I suppose this is how things work. But it should be _fair_ to point out the obvious too.

[johnofthesea]

> and call it a Python superset to raise VC money

What else was proclaimed just to raise VC money?

[dragonwriter]

The real unique selling point of Mojo is "CPU+GPU execution without CUDA", specifically, you write code that looks like code without worrying about distinctions like kernels and device functions and different ways of writing code that runs on GPU vs. code that runs on CPU, and mojo compiles it to those things.

[eigenspace]

Not unique though. Julia has had that since before Mojo was even started.

[saghm]

> For a language that announced itself (and raised a lot of money on the premise of) claiming to be "a Python superset", this does not sound like a huge achievement

I feel like that depends quite a lot on what exactly is in the non-subset part of the language. Being able to use a library from the superset in the subset requires being able to translate the features into something that can run in the subset, so if the superset is doing a lot of interesting things at runtime, that isn't necessarily going to be trivial.

(I have no idea exactly what features Mojo provides beyond what's already in Python, so maybe it's not much of an achievement in this case, but my point is that this has less to do with just being a superset but about what exactly the extra stuff is, so I'm not sure I buy the argument that the marketing you mention of enough to conclude that this isn't much of an achievement.)

[melodyogonna]

I've written this somewhere else before, Modular did not raise $130m to build a programming language, nobody does that. They raised that much money to revolutionize AI infrastructure, of which a language is just a subset. You should definitely check some of the things they've put together, they're amazing

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes. They are revolutionizing AI infrastructure but I guess a lot of world is just babbling about AI, but not every developer needs to worry about AI.

And so his improvements in mojo and now calling mojo code from python just make a lot more net positive to the community than being, some other Ai infrastructure company.

So I do wish a lot of good luck to mojo. I have heard that mojo isn't open source but it has plans to do so. I'd like to try it once if its as fast / even a little slower than rust and comparable to understanding as python.

[dismalaf]

It was never going to have Python semantics and be fast. Python isn't slow because of a lack of effort or money, it's slow because of all the things happening in the interpreter.

[meander_water]

Fwiw the website still claims this:

> Further, we decided that the right long-term goal for Mojo is to adopt the syntax of Python (that is, to make Mojo compatible with existing Python programs) and to embrace the CPython implementation for long-tail ecosystem support

Which I don't think has changed.

[boxed]

I believe they're still working towards making the syntax and semantics more python-like.