alt Hacker NewsTheir communication definitely needs work. I listened to the interview with Chris on the Lex Friedman podcast a few years ago. Back when the pitch still was "minimal python superset that allows us to make it go voom". It wasn't a bad pitch. But it's gotten a lot murkier since then apparently. And obviously pitching a new language just before world plus dog was about to switch to delegating programming work to AI agents wasn't great timing.
> "Qualcomm to Acquire Modular"
That's linked from their news section. If I read between the lines here what happened is the VC money ran out and they arranged some kind of acquihire. That obviously raises a lot of questions about what will happen to Mojo and the intentions around it. The merger was completed a few weeks ago so apparently this is a done deal. Them wrapping a ribbon around the 1.0 a few weeks later is a bit suggestive.
The modular front page reads like it was trying to pitch the whole thing as a competitor to other inference platforms like open router, replicate, bedrock, etc.
I'm sure there's more to it and that the tech was amazing. But the acquisition raises a lot of questions about the future of the whole thing. An OSS move at least would allow people to continue working on Mojo independently from Qualcomm. I assume some people in the team might be moving on post acquisition.
The Python tie in was always a sales pitch. The technical pitch was "a language built around MLIR taking all the lessons learned by Rust and Swift on board, with an eye towards Python interop". There were MLIR intrinsics and extensive discussions of the ownership model from the start, but never even an attempt to have classes.
And the main use of the language (and justification for the VC money) was always the engine built with it, which I have absolutely no opinion on.
Honestly, the promise of the language is immense. Ownership semantics that have much better ergonomics and are much more teachable than Rusts, and eventually a relatively smooth teaching path from Python to Mojo would make Mojo a default first modern low level language for many people coming in. Whether this will be relevant in the LLM world we live in now, where you can just take your Python prototype and have it be rewritten in Rust, who knows...