It's marketing in action, though Chris Lattner's reputation from LLVM and Swift has a lot to do with why it quickly gained a high profile in these circles. May

It's marketing in action, though Chris Lattner's reputation from LLVM and Swift has a lot to do with why it quickly gained a high profile in these circles. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. But who do you think has a vested interest in that meme being repeated? Mojo is a commercial, closed source language implementation backed by $30M of investor cash looking to turn a profit. I wish them luck and watch with interest. Like a lot of people I've had "write a very fast Python and ??? and profit" on my todo list for a while (it remains below "job to pay the bills" though) because there's been obvious user interest for some years, although it's not clear if that translates to much commercial demand. I think if they are successful and if they remain closed source, an open source clone will appear soon after, and within a year or two will match or outperform them on reported performance, but they will still have a business for the same sorts of reasons Red Hat remains profitable.