You're right that Mojo is a completely general purpose programming language. Community members are already building gui libraries and serving stuff etc.
It might not be the best thing, but here's the rationale for why we do this: it's basically that Mojo is still early, and being "good" at something requires more than a language - you also need a library ecosystem and committed community around there. We don't think it is time to declare that Mojo is a great solution for GUI development (for example) until these things happen.
In contrast, Modular is pushing hard to build out the AI part of the ecosystem and already has MAX engine and even more things coming, so we're pretty confident that Mojo will be great in the AI domain.
As the community builds out, we can expand positioning where it makes sense. We just don't want to overclaim.
Is there a packaging ecosystem, or does PyPi interoperate? I would love to start writing some Mojo code, but a key thing I'd love to do is make web requests. Any direction you have would be sincerely appreciated!
We're definitely going to explore this further, and have begun some discussions with the community to try and shape what this will look like for Mojo; see https://github.com/modularml/mojo/discussions/1785 for more details.
The discussion there is centered on a project manifest and build tool, and work is underway. Some of our guiding principles are to write this tooling in Mojo, as open source software, and to be focused on integration with existing build systems and ecosystems.
Of course, once we're able to define a Mojo project, and have a principled method of building all Mojo projects in the known universe, the natural next step would be to build out a packaging ecosystem. Again, we're interested in playing well with others, so while it's still early days, I think we'll want to have a well-thought-out interface with PyPI.
As for web requests: try searching GitHub for Mojo projects that may suit your needs: https://github.com/search?q=language%3Amojo+http&type=reposi... -- and by the way, we're also very proud that Mojo has become popular enough on GitHub that it can be searched like this, and its source code is syntax highlighted. If you don't see any Mojo packages on there that you like, try writing one yourself and letting us know on our Discord! Although we don't (yet!) have a build tool, you can clone a Mojo package from GitHub and import it into your project manually, so sharing code is possible -- we're working to make it not just possible, but downright awesome!
It might not be the best thing, but here's the rationale for why we do this: it's basically that Mojo is still early, and being "good" at something requires more than a language - you also need a library ecosystem and committed community around there. We don't think it is time to declare that Mojo is a great solution for GUI development (for example) until these things happen.
In contrast, Modular is pushing hard to build out the AI part of the ecosystem and already has MAX engine and even more things coming, so we're pretty confident that Mojo will be great in the AI domain.
As the community builds out, we can expand positioning where it makes sense. We just don't want to overclaim.
-Chris