ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

I think Mojo's cool and there's definitely a place for a modern applications programming language with C++ class(ish) performance, aka what Swift wanted to be but got trapped in the Apple ecosystem (designed by the same person as Mojo).

The strong AI focus seems to be a sign of the times, and not actually something that makes sense imo.

While I appreciate all his work on LLVM, Chris Lattner's Swift didn't work out so well for me, so I'm cautious about this.

Swift has some nice features. However, the super slow compilation times and cryptic error messages really erase any gains in productivity for me.

- "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time?" On an M3 Pro? What the hell!?

- To find an error in SwiftUI code I sometimes need to comment everything out block by block to narrow it down and find the culprit. We're getting laughs from Kotlin devs.

To be fair to Chris, I’ve only seen the message about compiler not being able to type check the expression in swiftui closure hell. I think he left (maybe partly) because of the SwiftUI influence on Swift.

Actually, even very basic code can cause it. The type system of Swift has issues.

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/2016/07/12/type-checker-i...

let a: Double = -(1 + 2) + -(3 + 4) + -(5)

Still fails on a very recent version of Swift, Swift 6.1.2, if my test works.

Chris Lattner mentions something about him being more of an engineer than a mathematician, but a responsible and competent computer science engineer that is designing programming languages with complex type systems, absolutely has to at least be proficient in university-level mathematics and relevant theory, or delegate out and get computer scientists to find and triple-check any relevant aspects of the budding programing language.