Just learn Mojo?
Preface: I’m new to AI/ML it’s always been on my todo list. Python never really appealed to me it’s a 💩 languages putting it nicely.
Mojo shows great promise but I’m curious if it’s a good idea to just learn mojo? More importantly re-implement things like Jax, Flax in pure mojo? Rust seems to be growing in this space as well I like polars and burn 🔥 a rust version of PyTorch. However I think mojo clearly has the edge.
My end goal is to completely write my data layer in mojo with a surraldb backend. The great thing about mojo is its ability to use python packages so you can actually use the surreal python sdk today with all its great built in ML features.
I have literally no experience in this field so I don’t know if this is a good idea or not! Is it a good idea to just learn mojo and build from the ground up?
3 Replies
If you're trying to land a job or even just be productive Python is very much still the way to go for now. If you're just trying to learn though building everything from scratch in Mojo is a great way to do that
as a superset (or at least a WIP one) of python. Mojo isn't so much standalone from Python as it is an extension of it much akin to typescript/javascript. So yeah you'll need to learn python first... trust me... i've also always been of the opinion that python was not my cup of tea but i'm learning to stomach and even enjoy it in order to further learn mojo. Knowing python well makes it much easier to convert python packages to pure mojo and you'll better know where to look for performance bottle necks and how to rewrite them for mojo.
On the plus side... you get from python to mojo levels pretty quickly... as python is super easy to learn especially if you already have programming experience in other languages.
It will be depending on the level that you are writing your package, for low-level mojo which involves memory management and playing around with pointers, python is not really useful here and emulating Rust or C code is more useful here, porting them to Mojo is in many cases easier to porting python.
If you want to port python code to mojo, then it is helpful to know python, but then only a small subset of python code that can be ported right now.