After looking at Mojo, I appreciated all the paradigms that Julia was pushing forward even more than I did before. Mojo's greatest asset and curse is focusing on being a better Python. Julia's greatest asset and curse is trying to do a lot more.
What other private company languages are there? Swift is the best example I can think of, which matches Mojo's situation down to the head of the project.
aren't most languages invented and initially developed within a private company? Go, Dart, Java, JavaScript, C#, F#, VBA, Kotlin, Erlang, C(at AT&T), Rust (at Mozilla). The list is probably very long
Most of those are open source, and while initially developed at a private company, most are run by non-profits (such as the Rust Foundation for Rust). Also, the language itself is not usually the main product at those companies.
The person in charge of Mojo was previously in charge of a massive effort to give tensorflow a new backend, for which he conveniently picked Swift (a language he was also involved in), despite there being better options, only to abandon it halfway through because it was intractable and Swift wasn’t ready/willing to support the compiler changes needed, so he just abandoned it, and now works on Mojo.
It gives real “Jony Ive leaving Apple to go work somewhere where nobody can tell him ‘no’ “ vibes.
Mojo also owes part of its design from the lessons it took from Julia (as per Chris Lattner [1]).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35791125