Is this closed source? I just assumed that a new programming language would be open source but I don't see any links to GitHub or any other place. The getting started page also requires you to put in your name and contact information.
Oh god I hope this is not a close source language. I have spent 10+ years fighting the MATLAB ecosystem, I prefer not to spend the next 10 years fighting this thing.
Matlab existed for a reason, and has since become irrelevant, in particular in the face of python being used as a more flexible open source scientific computing scripting language.
If this is closed source, it's already as irrelevant as matlab so no reason to fight it. If there are useful bits there will be python versions of them.
> Matlab existed for a reason, and has since become irrelevant
My man I wish this was true. I am not exaggerating the 10+ year thing, there are very important industries being run today on MATLAB. You remember the moment when you learned that a lot of wall street runs on excel? This is the moment you learn a lot of silicon manufacturing runs on MATLAB. An obscene amount.
Silicon manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, robotics, the list goes on. It’s a well-entrenched ecosystem that makes a decent chunk of cash and has a lot of staying power. Simulink seems like a major factor in this staying power.
Strongly disagree with this statement (and agree with the parent). In many hard engineering disciplines, appropriate solvers (e.g. SuiteSparse) are barely supported, if at all (e.g. scikit-sparse only supports CHOLMOD, and UMFPACK is supported via another package).
People overestimate how many people are willing to work on the "wrap C numerical library in Python" problem. On the other hand, Mathworks employs many people to work on things like mldivide. At least in the SuiteSparse case, the first class citizen is MATLAB.
Sounds like a niche to me, with lots of options (wrapping C numerical libraries in python) for people that don't want to be locked in.
When I was in school 15 years ago, matlab was pretty ubiquitous.
Maybe it was to strong to say it's irrelevant as opposed to niche, though it's definitely irrelevant in many fields where it used to be king. I do miss the figures though, I liked the combination of programmatic formatting + manual tweaks.
What exactly do you call a niche? Entire industries are being propped up using it. What happens is because the solvers are written in these things, engineers start building everything with matlab. I have personally made networking implementations, webservers, Apache Arrow clone etc. It's really not as niche as you think it is. For mostly worse, this language is everywhere.
Matlab is a lot faster than Python. At least an order of magnitude, once you move out of calls to LAPACK et al. It has been improved quite a bit on that front.
So Python is often not a realistic alternative. This is where initiatives like Mojo come in. They will be at least an order of magnitude faster than Matlab again.
But if you want to get people to move from Matlab to a powerful Open-Source alternative: Julia has a syntax that is much closer to Matlab than Python's. I had good success to get colleagues to use Julia which wouldn't look at Python, because the syntax was too far out of their comfort zone.
Yes, we expect that Mojo will be open-sourced. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan yet.
Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning?
Mojo is a big project and has several architectural differences from previous languages. We believe a tight-knit group of engineers with a common vision can move faster than a community effort. This development approach is also well-established from other projects that are now open source (such as LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, etc.)."
The problem with this is that you don't know what the licensing will be when/if they open source it. So you could start using it now and they might change their mind and choose not to open source it or it might be a restrictive license.
Also, even if fully open source, have to also look at governance.
(A canonical project can be steered in a way that makes it impractical for you, and forking is often also impractical.)
For now, I'd treat it as closed source, which is a non-starter for investing in, when I can accomplish the same in open source ways. And there's no sense in giving away the open source uptake benefits to a company when the software isn't open source.
Their response to why it's faster to move while closed source seems kinda like a false dichotomy. They can choose to start with it open disallow input from the community or close their issue tracker to the community.
One that pays expensive senior full time SWEs to build it does, yes. Every programming language uses one of two models:
1. Patronage
2. Business
Patronage is the Ruby/Python/Linux "one guy + volunteers" model where a few of the devs look for companies to pay them to do it as a full or side project basically for marketing purposes or because that company can afford to subsidize their tools. This clearly isn't that.
A VC backed startup making an open source language is neither patronage nor a business, unless you take the hard-cynic position of saying the investors have been tricked into being patrons.
I'm assuming they've got some sort of cloud related ideas for monetization, but it's tough.
