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Comment by jdiaz97 | Hacker News Reader

Great post. I think Mojo's claims like the speedup over Rust are a problem, like the 65000x speedup over Python. How can we differentiate between good new tech and Silicon Valley shenanigans when they use claims like that? They do nice titles and slogans but are shady in substance

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I can't take this language or company serious after reading stuff like:

"Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades"

https://www.fast.ai/posts/2023-05-03-mojo-launch.html

My answer to the deleted comment and to this.

It is a bunch of incremental improvements to the Python like language environment.

That's no big programming language advance to me. A biggie would be to Haskel or even Rust.

That's not to say it won't be wildly more successful as it gives a lot of what people want in a number of areas all in one go.

I'd jump on board except for the vibe around the current licensing. Maybe that will change and I'll be one of those Rust people who comment 'but Rust' on every C and C++ article, except I'll be saying "but Mojo" :)

Hard to remember the last language that felt so obviously sold by something other than an actual community. Even Swift tried its best to exist outside of xcode and mac/i os

EDIT: perhaps I'm being too harsh—this was literally just announced. I'm just taken aback by the blatant marketing as everyone else is.

Swift isn't trying anything, Apple only cares about their platforms.

Open source Swift is as relevant as Objective-C was, never expect any big uptake if none of the key frameworks is open source.

Outside Apple platforms it only fulfills two goals, being good enough for Apple and iOS developers to deploy their server code on GNU/Linux, a bit of goodwill marketing, and that is about it.

I meant only that occasionally I run across someone who fervently believes in bringing Swift to other platforms or even just outside the Cocoa/UIKit/whatever blob. It is very reminiscent of Apple's half-assed promotion of Objective-C outside their investments, I agree, but both languages had communities pushing for expanding their usage well outside the corporate sphere. Small communities, but easy to find.

There was v lang in recent memory which made grand claims.

A little bit of clickbait is what you need to get interest at all. That's just a fact of life.

As for this specific claim, it was coupled with a blog post that actually demonstrated the speedup on a specific problem. Getting several orders of magnitude speedup over plain python is often quite easy. That's why we have numpy and pandas after all!

Probably reasonable to label as a shenanigan if they try to differentiate with a emoji file extension.

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