[Staross]

Funny how the already weak case for not working on Julia instead of creating a new language is becoming even more flimsy :

FAQ:

> Why not make Julia better? > We think Julia is a great language and it has a wonderful community, but Mojo is completely different. While Julia and Mojo might share some goals and look similar as an easy-to-use and high-performance alternative to Python, we’re taking a completely different approach to building Mojo. Notably, Mojo is Python-first and doesn't require existing Python developers to learn a new syntax.

https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq/#why-not-make-julia-better

Now :

>We oversold Mojo as a Python superset too early and realized that we should focus on what Mojo can do for people TODAY, not what it will grow into. As such, we currently explain Mojo as a language that's great for making stuff go fast on CPUs and GPUs.

[amval]

Even funnier: https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/main/docs/WhySwiftF...

> Julia: Julia is another great language with an open and active community. They are currently investing in machine learning techniques, and even have good interoperability with Python APIs.

[Staross]

Yeah that was a missed opportunity fore sure, joining forces 8 years ago would probably had yield better results that the current situation.

[dragonwriter]

The share of projects that start out “we’re going to do X, and conpletely support using the syntax and semantics of existing language Y, but add more on top” that end up “we’re going to do X, in a language vaguely reminiscent of Y” is very hard to distinguish from 100%.

[fulafel]

I guess there's survivorship bias, but the ones that first come to mind fared pretty well with compatibility (eg C++, Typescript, Ocaml)

[ddaud]

I think the real reason is that Chris Lattner doesn’t want to work on Julia. He’s likely very (and justifiably so) opinionated about these topics, and probably wants a certain degree of creative authority over his projects.

[serial_dev]

Why deal with others when you are big enough of a name to launch your own and make all the decisions yourself?

[pjmlp]

Although from the way some Modular videos are done, it seems nowadays he is more in an overseer role and setting up the direction, while others are the ones actually pushing Mojo and Max tooling forward.

Maybe I just misunderstand it from the presentation format.

[pjmlp]

Additionally Julia works on Windows, lots of its issues have been ironed out throught the last decade, and many folks are invested into it, instead of a single company product.

Yes many of the mainstream languages started as single company product, but lets put it this way, would anyone be writing one of such languages today, had those not been languages gatekeeped to access a specific platform?

So outside accessing Max and its value preposition as product enabler for XYZ, who would be rushing to write Mojo code, instead of something else.

[MohamedMabrouk]

I think the modular proposition is to solve the AI infra problem using a modern systems programming language but with a python syntax (to keep the mental overhead low) it is mainly trying to replace C++/CUDA. I am not sure Julia is suitable for such endeavour. Julia is not marketed as a systems programming language and I find it hard to believe that it can be one as dyamically typed langauge with GC and JIT. Could Julia replace python in the high-level dynamic code space used in research and training? maybe. but I find it really hard to believe that it can replace CUDA/ROCm/C++ .. etc.