ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

Julia could be a great language for ML. It needs more mindshare and developer attention though

I don't understand why in the world someone would go from one dynamically typed language to another. Even the kernels example cited below is "eh, the types are whatever you want them to be" https://cuda.juliagpu.org/stable/tutorials/introduction/#Wri...

Then again, I am also open to the fact that I'm jammed up by the production use of dynamically typed languages, and maybe the "for ML" part means "I code in Jupyter notebooks" and thus give no shits about whether person #2 can understand what's happening

It's very important that readers, writers, maintainers, etc. of code are able to easily understand what that code is doing.

explicit and strict types on arguments to functions is one way, but certainly not the only way, nor probably the best way to effect that

I would actually be curious to hear your perspective on the "best way" that isn't typechecking. I literally cannot comprehend why someone would write such a thing

I readily admit that I am biased in that I believe that having a computer check that every reference to every relationship does what it promises, all the time

first and foremost great documentation & design docs cannot be surpassed as a tool to explain and understand code. and that is entirely language agnostic.

more generally, the most important bits of a particular function to understand is

* what should it be called with

* what should it return

* what side effects might it have

and the "what" here refers to properties in a general sense. types are a good shortcut to signify certain named collections of properties (e.g., the `Int` type has arithmetic properties). but there are other ways to express traits, preconditions, postconditions, etc. besides types