Simon Willison: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I, I, I'm curious, like, how come this wasn't thought of before? It's not like the, the, the concept of a language super set hasn't hasn't, has, has isn't, is completely new. But all, as far as I know, all the previous Python interpreter approaches, like the alternate runtime approaches are like they, they, they're more, they're more sort of, Fit conforming to standard Python, but never really tried this additional approach of augmenting the language. I, I'm wondering if you have many insights there on, like, why, like why is this a, a, a breakthrough? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So, Jeremy Howard's piece talks about this thing called M L I R, which I hadn't heard of before, but this was another Chris Latner project. You know, he built L L VM as a low level virtual machine. That you could build compilers on top of. And then M L I R was this one that he initially kicked off at Google, and I think it's part of TensorFlow and things like that. But it was very much optimized for multiple cores and GPU access and all of that kind of thing. And so my reading of Jeremy Howard's article is that they've basically built Mojo on top of M L I R. So they had a huge, huge like a starting point where they'd, they, they knew this technology better than anyone else. And because they had this very, very robust high performance basis that they could build things on. I think maybe they're just the first people to try and build a high, try and combine a high level language with M L A R, with some extra things. So it feels like they're basically taking a whole bunch of ideas people have been sort of experimenting with over the last decade and bundled them all together with exactly the right team, the right level of expertise. And it looks like they've got the thing to work. But yeah, I mean, I've, I've, I'm. Very intrigued to see, especially once this is actually available and we can start using it. It, Jeremy Howard is someone I respect very deeply and he's, he's hyping this thing like crazy, right? His headline, his, and he's not the kind of person who hypes things if they're not worth hyping. He said Mojo may be the biggest programming language advanced in decades. And from anyone else, I'd kind of ignore that headline. But from him it really means something. Yes, because he doesn't hype things up randomly. Yeah, and, and, and he's a noted skeptic of Julia which is, which is also another data science hot topic. But from the TypeScript and web, web development worlds there has been a dialect of TypeScript that was specifically optimized to compile, to web assembly which I thought was like promising and then, and, and eventually never really took off. But I, I like this approach because I think more. Frameworks should, should essentially be languages and recognize that they're language superset and maybe working compilers that that work on them. And then that is the, by the way, that's the direction that React is going right now. So fun times…

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