Hacker News Reader

Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the governments of the world need to put resources into some of these major spokes of technology. I know 1B is a lot of money, but the US throws that around. Imagine 1B into python. Nah, don't even imagine that, its too much money. Imagine 50M.

I'm somewhat surprised big tech hasnt lobbied for something like this. Maybe they like their silos. Everyone gets a cut, don't shake the boat.

View on HN

I mean, MOJO has 100 million in funding and is 'supposedly' building a faster and better python.

Programming improvements are all about hiring a small group of highly talented engineers. Funding a lab of 10 tenured R1 level PL researchers to work on python fulltime will likely cost $5 million/yr and should be more than enough for whatever 'leap forwards' people want to facilitate.

Python is of course a major boon to humanity, but the things that need funding are typically things that corporations aren't using. It's our reliance on private spokes of technology (think: app stores & sales platforms, operating systems, hardware designs, etc) that are major risks to the long-term stability of our society and economy.

Those are open ended problems though.

Something like python's GIL issue is something with a clear end game. It just needs resources.

I suspect smart people could fix the nightmare around dependencies and packaging for less than 3M, and the economic gains would be immeasurable.

Agreed[0].

[0] https://python-poetry.org

cmd -f rust. Nope. C. Nope. Headers. Nope. Meson. Nope.

Poetry doesn't handle the hard part of packaging, which is getting compiled dependencies working on approximately 50 different combinations of platform, architecture, version, and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com