Lex Fridman
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2023–2026
3:34:04 · 2M views · Jun 2, 2023
Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.
HN points to it as the main place to hear Lattner's motivations and design ideas for Mojo, often in Mojo threads.
8 comments from Hacker News
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 this video [LINK] [LINK]
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] this video
Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman (Episode 381, June 2nd, 2023): - this video - [LINK] - [LINK] He has two other episodes on the show: - [LINK] (Episode 131, October 18th, 2020) - [LINK] (Episode 21, May 13th, 2019)
This episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, where Chris Lattner talks to Fridman about Mojo and other things, might be of interest to readers: this 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]: this video [1]: [LINK]