Chris Lattner: Future of Programming and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #381

This episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, where Chris Lattner talks to Fridman about Mojo and other things, might be of interest to readers: [VIDEO]

Lattner being behind Mojo always engendered some benefit of the doubt despite my initial gripes with the marketing claims, but his recent interview with Lex Fridman [1] further emboldened my stance that if Mojo can succeed, Lattner is one of the best-positioned engineers to see it through. [1] [VIDEO]

Mojo seems like a very promising solution, despite it being AI oriented. Lex Friedman had a great podcast with the founder, its first version was released about a month ago, and in two weeks got 10k discord users. A superset of python that, once finished, can run all native python code, but also adds language features to get closer to the “metal”, getting speeds of C libraries with the ability to properly debug and step through it. If this project goes the way it’s promised (the guy has great experience with language development), this could further cement python as it would solve its biggest criticisms. Very excited for it [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]

Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman (Episode 381, June 2nd, 2023): - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] He has two other episodes on the show: - [LINK] (Episode 131, October 18th, 2020) - [LINK] (Episode 21, May 13th, 2019)

Anyone who doesn't know, this is by Chris Lattner the famous hacker who made projects like LLVM, Clang, Swift. [LINK] He is writing this as part of a marketing blitz for his new platform Mojo [LINK] If you want to see more, he did a long interview with lex fridman recently as part of the same marketing blitz [VIDEO] maybe dang will put this into the recirculation queue and retitle it something like 'chris lattner writes blogpost' it will go to number one place on hacker news

I think largely because swift and mojo have the same creator, chris lattner. He was a guest on lex fridman last week [VIDEO]

I mean honestly, the closest language to Mojo really is Nim. In the latest Lex Fridman interview with Chris Lattner [0] when he talks about his ideas behind Mojo it pretty much sounds like he's describing Nim. Ok fair, he wants Mojo to be a full superset of Python, but honestly with nimpy [1] our Python interop is about as seamless as it can really be (without being a superset, which Mojo clearly is not yet). Even the syntax of Mojo looks a damn lot like Nim imo. Anyway, I guess he has the ability to raise enough funds to hire enough people to write his own language within ~2 years so as not have to follow random peoples whim about where to take the language. So I guess I can't blame him. But as someone who's pretty invested in the Nim community it's quite a shame to see such a hyped language receive so much attention by people who should really check out Nim. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]

>I don't understand what open source has to do with this. People being able to see your source code doesn't somehow prevent you from changing it however you want. Yes, they can voice their opinion on it, but you can also just ignore it. Deep link to Chris Lattner interview where he says he learned lessons from Swift being rapidly released as open source meant that early design decisions that were suboptimal caused quick revisions. This caused a lot of complaints when later revisions to Swift caused breakages. This caused a lot of stress for Chris & the Swift team so he says he didn't want to repeat that for Mojo. [VIDEO] Sure, one can simple redo the exact same playbook with Mojo and iterate out in the open with early versions, and when people complain again about their code breaking, he can "just ignore it" but he didn't like that experience with Swift.