[melodyogonna]

I've written this somewhere else before, Modular did not raise $130m to build a programming language, nobody does that. They raised that much money to revolutionize AI infrastructure, of which a language is just a subset. You should definitely check some of the things they've put together, they're amazing

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes. They are revolutionizing AI infrastructure but I guess a lot of world is just babbling about AI, but not every developer needs to worry about AI.

And so his improvements in mojo and now calling mojo code from python just make a lot more net positive to the community than being, some other Ai infrastructure company.

So I do wish a lot of good luck to mojo. I have heard that mojo isn't open source but it has plans to do so. I'd like to try it once if its as fast / even a little slower than rust and comparable to understanding as python.

[ModernMech]

Agreed, Modular is walking a very fine line, and they're doing so by trading on the reputation of Chris Lattner.

On the one had, as the other poster noted, no one raises $100M+ for a programming language; programming languages have no ROI that would justify that kind of money. So to get it, they had to tell VCs a story about how they're going to revolutionize AI. It can't just be "python superset with MLIR". That's not a $100M story.

On the other hand, they need to appeal to the dev community. For devs, they want open source, they want integration with their tools, they don't want to be locked into a IP-encumbered ecosystem that tries to lock them in.

That's where the tension is. To raise money you need to pretend you're the next Oracle, but to get dev buy-in you have to promise you're not the next Oracle.

So the line they've decided to walk is "We will be closed for now while figure out the tech. Then later once we have money coming in to make the VCs happy, we can try to make good on our promise to be open."

That last part is the thing people are having trouble believing. Because the story always goes: "While we had the best intentions to be open and free, that ultimately came secondary to our investors' goal of making money. Because our continued existence depends on more money, we have decided to abandon our goal of being open and free."

And that's what makes these VC-funded language plays so fraught for devs. Spend the time to learn this thing which may never even live up to its promises? Most people won't, and I think the Darklang group found that out pretty decisively.

[melodyogonna]

I don't think investors look at what makes a net positive to the community when making large investments like in Modular. I was calling out the part of the post that said Modular raised a lot of Money to develop Mojo, that isn't entirely true as just creating a language isn't enough reason to invest $130m into a company, no matter how much net-positivity the language would bring.