A Ray of Hope: Array Programming for the 21st Century

The ideas of APL and its successors, the array programming languages, were two generations ahead of their time. These languages are based on the notion that everything is a tensor, and all operations are rank-polymorphic: they extend automatically to tensors of any rank. These ideas are perfectly suited to an era of machine learning, large scale data, GPUs and other accelerators. Building on recent academic research, we are building ShapeRank, a new statically typed, purely functional language for industrial use, that extends rank-polymorphism to streams. We’ll introduce the key ideas and show how they are realized in ShapeRank.
Presented by Gilad Bracha