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Mojo is available for local download

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Re: Mojo is available for local download

#171

Post by wraptile »

chubot wrote: post #103
ayhanfuat wrote: post #49

It seems quite exciting and all but I cannot figure out why they choose to impress people with marketing posts like "it is a billion times faster, oh no it is actually a zillion times faster" while their actual potential user base is waiting for license issues to be clarified.

What’s unclear about it? It’s a closed source product by a for profit company It would be nice if it were open source, but I don’t see anything that’s unclear about the IP.

Mojo team is avoiding this topic like a plague. I recently listened to whole Lex Fridman episode with Mojo's founder Chris Lattner [1] and I don't think they said a word about licensing. I still don't get it tbh.

I don't even understand how can Mojo be compared to Python without reflecting on Python Software Foundation which is arguably the main reason Python is such a wild success. We should do more PSF not less.

1 - https://lexfridman.com/chris-lattner-3

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#172

Post by sillyfluke »

qaq wrote: post #163
mathisfun123 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave you two examples of past poor performance and you either blithely ignored them or dismissed them as unimportant because it's "totally outside what you do". Then at the end you admitted you don't pay attention to the details. So we're either back to why are debating things you don't understand or why are you fawning. The thing that always gets me in these pissing contests is some random decides to wade in based…

Could you give me an example of a "claim" I made ?

To be fair mathisfun123 was originally responding to someone who tried it out and was somewhat disappointed by the state of things given the hype. It's a valid point.

Responding with only "have you looked at the team?" with nothing to say about the current state of things, which was what the sidethread was about, is what probably set them off since it is actually a pretty patronizing thing to say.

You want to give more leeway to the team because you think they earned the cred. mathisfun123, not impressed by the details of certain past projects, is not going to hold their breath until the current state justifies the current hype.

Both are reasonable positions.

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#173

Post by ayhanfuat »

mort96 wrote: post #165
ayhanfuat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How license will evolve is unclear. I personally don't mind it starting closed to figure out a contribution model or whatever they want to sort out as long as they have clear commitment. However, the current statement for open source is so vague that I don't want to invest time on it.

Good. It's an early alpha product. You shouldn't invest time into it. If their current licensing model prevents people from using it from anything serious, that sounds like a win.

It's a programming language. Just playing around to see what it is capable of means serious time investment. I wasn't planning on using it on production. Anyway, that was a feedback for the creators. I'll check back if they change the license.

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#174

Post by sundarurfriend »

ddragon wrote: post #126
gostsamo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the better languages were actually good, they wouldn't have allowed python to whip their asses. Python won because it was nice and easy. meet your users where they are, not where you want them to be.

That would be simplifying too much. There are a lot of external factors for something being popular, like timing, luck, support from big enterprises and leading colleges, inertia and sunk costs. You could argue that does make python better regardless of the language itself but that poster was talking about a hypothetical scenario in which those factors were won by a language better designed for those tasks. Would you…

Also, Python is where the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" type stuff really started being a massive phenomenon.

Language wars have been forever, of course. But for a few years around 2010-ish, practically every single thread would have someone bringing up Python. If the post was about a tool, how the thing should have really been written in Python. If it was a how-to tutorial about a feature in another language, there would be a subthread about how Python undeniably does it better. Not occasionally, in a thread here and there - it was to the extent you couldn't miss it even if you wanted to. That's a kind of marketing that's proven effective in a forum like this, which is why it's being replicated by other languages now.

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#175

Post by frou_dh »

ActivePattern wrote: post #99
frou_dh wrote: post #10

I wonder whether this will end up being a viable language for people who just want to write fast general purpose code with Python's syntax, and not write any AI/ML-related stuff.

AFAIK, it's a general purpose language. I don't see any reason you wouldn't be able to use it for applications outside of ML.

Well there are countless obscure general-purpose languages and language implementations. What I meant by viable is that the user won't feel like a masochist because of weak tooling and library availability.

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#176

Post by poulpy123 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #63

A rant. I apologize. I try to avoid on HN and in general. Faster, yes, but at what cost? I'm so impressed by the Python community, but I'll never quite understand why they gravitated to... Python itself. It's unbelievable to me that in Mojo's case some of the brightest, most famous engineers have gathered to do incredible computer science work to improve the compute performance of a language that is fundamentally fla…

> if the community had gravitated to a better language

As someone that started to use python for science relatively soon (before numpy), I have to ask: which better language was existing at this time ?

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#177

Post by nvm0n2 »

kunwon1 wrote: post #98
knowsuchagency wrote: post #22

I've had high hopes for this project since its announcement, but until it's open-source, I'm not investing any time in it. That's the only announcement I care about

Their FAQ says this: Over time we expect to open-source core parts of Mojo, such as the standard library. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan for open-sourcing yet. I read this as: "There are parts of Mojo that we are not planning to open source" Which makes this a non-starter for me a…

What's the specific threat you're worried about? Abandonment and needing to port to some other language eventually?

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#178

Post by IshKebab »

ptx wrote: post #58
IshKebab wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it was pretty good in the Python 2 era but definitely not something to copy now. Another big issue is that it's not expression based. For example you can't do `foo = (yield a).b` you have to do `x = yield a; foo = x.b`. Having a special syntax for the expression version of if else is another example as you said. I was disappointed to discover Dart made the same mistake there. There's a totally different syntax f…

> For example you can't do `foo = (yield a).b` you have to do `x = yield a; foo = x.b`. The first snippet actually works fine. Yield expressions were introduced with PEP 342 in Python 2.5.

Ah I misremembered. I was actually trying to do this

    x = [yield a for a in b]
Which yields (heh) an `Invalid Syntax` error. Thanks for the link to that PEP though - turns out the answer is that you almost always have to parenthesise it.

    x = [(yield a) for a in b]
> SyntaxError: yield inside list comprehension

Ok my original point stands.

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#179

Post by Kwpolska »

gostsamo wrote: post #80
mrcwinn wrote: post #63

A rant. I apologize. I try to avoid on HN and in general. Faster, yes, but at what cost? I'm so impressed by the Python community, but I'll never quite understand why they gravitated to... Python itself. It's unbelievable to me that in Mojo's case some of the brightest, most famous engineers have gathered to do incredible computer science work to improve the compute performance of a language that is fundamentally fla…

if the better languages were actually good, they wouldn't have allowed python to whip their asses. Python won because it was nice and easy. meet your users where they are, not where you want them to be.

Python won in the data science/ML/AI crowds, and most of the hard work is being done by C code. In other industries, Python ranges from " successful with multiple contenders" (web) to "niche/unusable" (mobile and gaming).

Re: Mojo is available for local download

#180

Post by entropyie »

knowsuchagency wrote: post #22

I've had high hopes for this project since its announcement, but until it's open-source, I'm not investing any time in it. That's the only announcement I care about

I dunno, remains to be proven, but if you managed a commercial python code base and could get a 2x performance improvement across the board by switching interpreters, wouldn't you at least give it a shot?
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