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by screye 407 days ago
Even after all the praise, I'd say they're underrated.

Modular.ai raised $100 million to solve tangentially similar problems with python. Astral has already had a much larger impact, while providing better integration with less than 10% of that money.
2 comments
melodyogonna 406 days ago
Modular raised $100 million to build heterogeneous AI infrastructure; building a language is just a subset of their goals.
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swyx 407 days ago
disagree. modular has a different focus, to turn python into a systems language.

you could even say that astral and modular focus on two extreme ends of the developer experience spectrum - just making python tooling faster, vs making python-ish code faster.

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screye 407 days ago
To be clear, I wasn't dunking on Modular. I meant it more as praise for what Astral has achieved. Lattner is a veteran and Mojo seems to be coming along at a good pace. Mojo is admittedly more of a Rust-competitor. Couldn't think of other contemporary "we are trying fix python's problems" companies. So went for the low hanging fruit.

Either way, Python's irritants are the 'stick' that motivates devs to try alternatives. Astral is patching python's problems at lightning speed. Soon, there may not be enough incentive left to migrate off python. I'm assuming Mojo's target customer is an application dev who uses python and not a seasoned system dev looking for a more aesthetic language.

fwiw, I hope Mojo succeeds.

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