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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Here is a serious contender[0] minus all the hype and the $100M in VC money. You would expect a minimum of interest given how Mojo is received by the community, but not really in practice.

[0]: https://chapel-lang.org/

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I'm sure Chapel has its merits, but one of the main selling points of Mojo is the aspiration to be part of the Python ecosystem, and so far I haven't seen any other programming language offering a similar promise, other than Python itself coupled with DSLs or other extensions for high performance.

Those interested in the intersection between Python, HPC, and data science may want to take a look at Arkouda, which is a Python package for data science at massive scales (TB of memory) at interactive rates (seconds), powered by Chapel:

* https://github.com/Bears-R-Us/arkouda * https://twitter.com/ChapelLanguage/status/168858897773200179...

> to be part of the Python ecosystem

I'd rather use Python if I'm in the Python ecosystem. So many attempts were made in the past to make a new language compatible with the Python ecosystem (look up hylang and coconu -- https://github.com/evhub/coconut). But at the end of the day, I'd come back to Python because if there's one thing I've learnt in recent years it's this:

    minimize dependencies at all costs.

I don't think those fill the same niche. They're nice-to-haves on top of Python. The promise of Mojo is that it's for when Python isn't good enough and you need to go deeper, but you want the Python ecosystem and don't want to write C.

I believe the main Mojo use cases are scenarios in which you'd need dependencies anyway. Code that you can't write in Python due to performance concerns, so you'd need to call C/C++/Rust/CUDA/Triton/etc anyway.

honestly that is the main thing that makes me pretty sure Mojo will fail. Right now, the types of things it doesn't support include keyword arguments and lists of lists. The place where python compatibility really matters is C API compatibility and they are hilariously far away from that for now.

I mean honestly, the closest language to Mojo really is Nim. In the latest Lex Fridman interview with Chris Lattner [0] when he talks about his ideas behind Mojo it pretty much sounds like he's describing Nim. Ok fair, he wants Mojo to be a full superset of Python, but honestly with nimpy [1] our Python interop is about as seamless as it can really be (without being a superset, which Mojo clearly is not yet). Even the syntax of Mojo looks a damn lot like Nim imo. Anyway, I guess he has the ability to raise enough funds to hire enough people to write his own language within ~2 years so as not have to follow random peoples whim about where to take the language. So I guess I can't blame him. But as someone who's pretty invested in the Nim community it's quite a shame to see such a hyped language receive so much attention by people who should really check out Nim. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[0]: https://youtu.be/pdJQ8iVTwj8?si=LfPSNDq8UKKIsJd3

[1]: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

For what it's worth, I think what Mojo does do better is that it's trying to be a better Python. Chapel's syntax immediately discourages me from using it.

How many of Python's warts does it fix?

It is not aimed at fixing Python’s warts. It seeks to provide (near?) 100% source compatibility, so those warts need to work the same.

So, we'll have to run every fucking Python project in a separate Docker image as usual, then. Got it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivpCKEiQOQ

I wonder if there's a happy medium between the two. Mojo definitely didn't need $100M in funding... but maybe Chapel could use $100K or so for better marketing.

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

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