This isn't quite accurate; Mojo uses the same memory safety approach as Rust. It has some mutable aliasing, but only intra-function, so in practice programs will be pretty much Rust-shaped.
Their comment seems to be mostly focused on surface-level syntax from what I can tell (e.g. "wrapped in a Python-like skin"; "what they imagine a good C++ will look like"). Rust code probably does resemble functional languages to someone who uses C++ primarily, and Mojo doesn't resemble them as much. I don't find that to be a particularly enlightening insight, but I have to imagine that the syntax of Mojo is one of the first things that will catch people's attention, so it's not surprising to me that it's something that people will have a lot to say about.
My hot take is that what a good C++ will act like is basically just already Rust, mostly because the main problems with C++ can only be solved by taking away some of what makes it C++ in the first place. Some C++ developers will probably not be happy with a language that takes away the parts they still want to use, but others might just not like what Rust "looks like", so if dressing up the same Rust semantics in a new skin ends up getting the world more code written without the bad parts of C++, that's probably a good thing.
Yeah exactly. Rust could also be thought of as a much better C++ (semantically) but syntatically it is much more functional, while Mojo adopts (and even extends) similar memory safety ideas but dressed in a skin that is potentially much more approachable to people used to procedural programmng.
