ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

Mojo is the enshitification of programming. Learning a language is too much cognitive investment for VC rugpulls. You make the entire compiler and runtime GPL or you pound sand, that has been the bar for decades. If the new cohort of programmers can’t hold the line, we’ll all suffer.

For decades, paying for compiler tools was a thing.

True, but aren't we in a better place now? I think the move to free tools was motivated by programmers, and not by their employers. I've read that it became hard to hire people if you used proprietary tools. Even the great Microsoft open-sourced their flagship C# language. And it's ironic but telling that the developers of proprietary software don't trust proprietary tools. And every developer looks at the state of the art in proprietary engineering tooling, such as CAD, and retches a little bit. I've seen many comments on HN along those lines.

And "correlation is not causality," but the occupation with the most vibrant job market until recently was also the one that used free tools. Non-developers like myself looked to that trend and jumped on the bandwagon when we could. I'm doing things with Python that I can't do with Matlab because Python is free.

Interestingly, we may be going back to proprietary tools, if our IDE's become a "terminal" for the AI coding agents, paid for by our employers.

Not really, as many devs rediscover public domain, shareware, demos and open core, because it turns out there are bills to pay.

If you want the full C# experience, you will still be getting Windows, Visual Studio, or Rider.

VSCode C# support is under the same license as Visual Studio Community, and lack several tools, like the advanced graphical debugging for parallel code and code profiling.

The great Microsoft has not open sourced that debugger, nor many other tools on .NET ecosystem, also they can afford to subsidise C# development as gateway into Azure, and being valued in 4 trillion, the 2nd biggest in the world.