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>I don't understand what open source has to do with this. People being able to see your source code doesn't somehow prevent you from changing it however you want. Yes, they can voice their opinion on it, but you can also just ignore it.

Deep link to Chris Lattner interview where he says he learned lessons from Swift being rapidly released as open source meant that early design decisions that were suboptimal caused quick revisions. This caused a lot of complaints when later revisions to Swift caused breakages. This caused a lot of stress for Chris & the Swift team so he says he didn't want to repeat that for Mojo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdJQ8iVTwj8&t=2h22m05s

Sure, one can simple redo the exact same playbook with Mojo and iterate out in the open with early versions, and when people complain again about their code breaking, he can "just ignore it" but he didn't like that experience with Swift.

That doesn't clarify anything at all to me at least. If the goal was to avoid people depending on it before it was ready, why had I been hearing about it for so long before this? Something being marketed is not consistent with a concern to avoid having people rely on it and voice their opinions.

>to avoid people depending on it before it was ready, why had I been hearing about it for so long before this?

There's always been a history of various projects in beta/preview pre-1.0 versions that nevertheless don't wait for the official 1.0 release to generate buzz, attract mindshare, evangelize, etc. Typescript and Rust language did that. And today, Zig is still pre-1.0 and yet has similar active "marketing" via blogs, HN posts, opinion pieces, etc.

The point of the deep link is to show that for Swift, Chris did actually try your suggested idea of just releasing the early version and fix whatever mistakes are in it out in the open regardless of criticism. He didn't like how the that stressed out the team.

Yes, you advised "just ignore it" but he's human and it seems reasonable to accept his answer at face value that he didn't want to redo that stressful timeline all over again for Mojo. But for some reason, his answer is unacceptable to you and prefer to think the delayed open sourcing Mojo is caused by some other hidden agenda.

I think it's as simple as comparing the the community dynamics of 2 different timelines:

- stressful to deal with angry people : iterate and fix language mistakes in 1.0 --> 2.0 --> 4.0

- calmer because of managed expectations : iterate in alpha/beta/preview 0.x --> 0.x+1 --> 1.0

Things can still break in beta .... but then again, that's the expectation around pre-1.0 versions.

> Zig is still pre-1.0 and yet has similar active "marketing" via blogs, HN posts, opinion pieces, etc.

Yes, and it's open source, and more to the point, it's because the developers do genuinely seem to want feedback and interaction with the community. That's ostensibly the entire point of having public release announcements, which Mojo has had before 1.0.

> The point of the deep link is to show that for Swift, Chris did actually try your suggested idea of just releasing the early version and fix whatever mistakes are in it out in the open regardless of criticism. He didn't like how the that stressed out the team.

That does not seem accurate in terms of what I'm asking about here; if I'm reading the history right, Swift was not open source until version 2.2.

It's still not clear to me how any what you have said addresses what I'm asking: how does being closed source solve the problem that's cited as the reason for it being closed for so long, and why wouldn't not marketing/releasing the language at all be the actual solution to those sort of problems?

Do you remember how long it took Python 2.7 to die after Python 3 came out? Years. It was horrible.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you claiming that if Mojo was open source earlier, everyone would still be using the old versions for a long time? I don't buy the claim that a pre-1.0 language only a few years old without widespread production use is comparable to one of the most widely used languages on the planet that had been around for close to two decades at the time of what you're describing.

Even if I did think that was a comparable precedent, that still doesn't address the more direct point I made about marketing the language at all if this was a concern. What does being closed source do to prevent people from running old versions of a compiler to avoid updating their code?

It prevents endless discussions on github, hurt egos when my precious PR is rejected by committers, and commentary on not being true open source because they are not welcoming source contribution, feature request, when they are trying stabilize compiler and so on.

Now none of these are guaranteed to happen when it is open source. But at least it is guaranteed to not happen when its not open source.

I don't understand that argument at all, unless you think that the only value of open source is in the potential for people to say nice things about your project. If you think there's inherent value in something being open source, you don't even need to have a Github repo (a tarball on your website with the source code is open source), and nothing anyone says would take away from that inherent value.

I'm firmly of the opinion that there's inherent value in being open source. I would honestly expect most developers to recognize that nowadays, but maybe I'm wrong. My concern is that someone who doesn't think this is the case is probably more likely to also not want to come right out and say it, because that would potentially prevent them from getting the value they're truly looking for from the stuff they do open source. The justifications that are being given here is that they seem to be heavily predicated on the value of open source being primarily from marketing rather than the very nature of code being open having value on its own, and I would be both surprised and disappointed if that's the opinion of the people in charge of Mojo. I'm sincerely hoping that there's something else going on here though, so I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt and see if I'm missing something.

> Are you claiming that if Mojo was open source earlier, everyone would still be using the old versions for a long time?

No, just saying it's happened before and it doesn't seem unreasonable to be wary of it.

Okay, but by that logic, if I can point to one instance of something suboptimal happening due to software being closed source, then it's reasonable to be wary of that too. I don't see how this is a plausible justification for keeping something closed source in the absence of taking into account the likelihood of something similar happening here, and for the reasons I laid out previously, I think it's borderline absurd to claim that was a real concern in the timeline that Mojo was closed.

People choose what to worry about. You can say it's unfair because they could've worried about a different set of things, but at the end of the day it's their choice.

I'm not saying you can't worry about this; I'm saying it does not seem to be a particular compelling reason for Mojo being closed source for so long, and I'm dubious that the rationale was due to anything like this.

> I'm not saying you can't worry about this

The relentless demand for justification is indistinguishable from a demand for others to stop doing things you don't like.

> but you can also just ignore it.

Apparently, this isn't as easy for some people who are deeply involved

E.g. GRRM avoids reading fan theories so that he doesn't change his writings to actively thwart them.