ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

superset of Python was never a goal. It was a talking point to try and build momentum that was quietly dropped once it served it's purpose of getting Mojo some early attention.

I tend to agree, which is why I can't recommend Mojo, despite thinking their tech is pretty innovative. If they're willing to lie about something that basic, I can't trust any of their other claims.

I hope that’s not what it was, that makes them seem very manipulative and dishonest. I was under the impression it was a goal, but they dropped it when it became apparent it was too hard. That’s much more reasonable to understand.

I'd agree with you if Mojo was a project by an inexperienced team, but it wasn't. Chris Latner alone has decades of PL experience and the issues with making Python fast are fundamental and well known. anyone who comes around with a sales pitch for making a portion implementation that's significantly faster than Pypy is either incredibly naive or lying

For me, it’s because Chris is part of the team I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I will assume ego-driven naïveté over malice. It’s not unheard of.

I don't think they were intentionally rug pulling the community. More likely they started out thinking they can build a python superset, realised it wasn't a good idea so quickly pivoted to the current design. Making Mojo more Python-like is now on their long term roadmap (https://docs.modular.com/mojo/roadmap/#phase-3-dynamic-objec...).

Thank you, that's not entirely wrongbut not the full picture. Our initial explanation had two problems actually,

1) we were "ambitiously optimistic" (different way of saying "ego-driven naïveté" perhaps :) ) and 2) the internet misread our long-term ambitions as being short-term goals.

We've learned that the world really really wants a better Python and the general attention spans of clickbait are very short - we've intentionally dialed back to very conservative claims to avoid the perception of us overselling.

We're still just as ambitious though!

-Chris

I am regularly tracking Mojo both in Discord and their forums.

It was indeed their goal to support Python as superset. Many discussions were around that. So I would not claim any malice in there.

It's still a talking point. Lattner said in this very interview "at some point people will consider it to be a Python superset, and effectively it will feel just like the best way to do Python in general." Note the hedging phrase, "consider it to be".

Even if the goal is to be just "close enough", It seems as pie-in-the-sky (Py-in-the-sky?) now as it did when Mojo was first announced. CPython has a huge surface area and it seems like if Mojo is going to succeed they are going to want to focus on differentiating features in the ML space and not going feature-for-feature with CPython. I don't know what "close enough" is, but closer than Py2 was to Py3, certainly.