Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it all composes in Julia. You mean that, in Julia, we the users have to "compose" our own implementations of models (e.g. log probabilities), as opposed to using the already-made ones in Python?
More like... most of the scientific Python stack has settled on a third party library, NumPy, to provide support for numerical computing. That includes providing data types like arrays. Tensorflow doesn't use NumPy's data types, so if you want to use Tensorflow Probability, you need to convert everything you've done in NumPy (or things that are built on top of NumPy, like Pandas) to TensorFlow, and use TensorFlow's f…
Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
291–300 of 432 posts
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#292It's a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language. Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value propos…
Agreed, adoption is everything. Something the Clojure community never quite grasped.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#293It's a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language. Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value propos…
> I guess it goes to show that the governance and availability of a language have a lot more to do with adoption than the merits of the language itself. Nearly every Google project eventually gets abandoned because the engineers that made it get promoted and move on to their next promotable projects. The root cause is the ongoing failure of Google's leaders to align employee incentives with the long-term interests of…
From what I've seen S4TF is not widely used inside Google - don't think there's support for tfx here.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#294So that's it then - another decade of unchallenged dominance of AI by a Betamax scripting language designed by accretion for early 90s CPU architecture. I just don't get the whole Python for ML craze.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its becoming like the same grasp js has on the web...which is sad to see.
This is a false equivalence of the first order. What makes JS impossible to dethrone is that whatever replaces it would need to be supported by a critical mass of web browsers, which just won't happen. AI/ML on the other hand has no such restriction. Your new startup could build all their ML models in Java with DeepLearning4J and it would probably work fine. Python is used because it's easy to work with for experimen…
Don't forget Web Assembly. That could easily dethrone JS but it will take time. All the major browsers have been evergreen for some time now so it's not like we're back in the early 2000s.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#296And TensorFlow for C# is alive and kicking: https://losttech.software/gradient.html I guess this is sort of an ad. Swift was a weird choice for statically typed TensorFlow, being only popular on the platform, that does not have GPU/TPU support in TensorFlow, which is, basically, a requirement for any serious work. The fact, that they had to fork the compiler did not help either. TensorFlow for C# is much like TensorF…
Do you know if tensorflow for Java is as mature as tensorflow for C#?
Btw of you didn't saw it, Facebook is implementation support for auto differentiation to the Kotlin compiler
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#297I'm curious which of the many "evolutions" that went into Swift in the last few years were motivated heavily by its dance with TensorFlow. If there were any, can we take them back out? Now that the marriage is over? One of the things that frustrates me with a lot of the languages I'm having to grok these days, is they often lack consistency, because it's one carrot after another to get buy in from different sub commu…
I think this is a great observation, aka too many chefs. My criticism of Swift, is that it has become a “kitchen-sink” language over the past seven years (I’ve been using it since the first public beta), like C++. So many features have been added that it’s gone from being a “I can keep this language in my head” language to a “I have to routinely lookup how this thing works even though I program in Swift regularly” language. It’s gotten too big IMHO and could have used a good editor instead of design by committee. The recent function builder and property wrapper additions (added it seems because the SwiftUI folks wanted them) are particularly emblematic of how it has become less readable.
The recent language additions have made me much less enthusiastic about it because like C++ it’s becoming a language where each person uses their own subset and style, instead of having a common elegance.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Swift lets you write code that's as concise as Python while still being fast, > (TensorFlow is actually mostly C++, which makes it difficult for a Python developer to debug.) To be honest, if I had to choose between Python and Swift I'd still choose Python. Swift is a nice evolution from Obj-C and all but it is nowhere near as simple as Python, or Ruby, or PHP, or Javascript, or Kotlin. And Apple's documentation of…
To say that Swift is "nowhere near as simple" as Javascript or Kotlin is a very strange opinion to me, and I have experience with all 3. Simple as in syntax, memory management, or in what regard? I can't think of a single example where Swift is not equivalent or better. Do you have the same criticism of Scala?
Swift has no traced garbage collector which means you cannot represent circular data structure/references.
Also swift support for interfaces (protocol) is sub-par with today standards
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#299Swift now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous. Anyone knows if chris latner is at least using swift in his new company ? I have the feeling swift never really worked in the server side, data science is now officially a failure, and all that is left is now a very niche market of 100% native mobile development. I love this language, but i'm eager to see it handled by a proper found…
I don't get the hype about Swift. There are at least 4 features in Swift I can think of that are just plain clunky:
1. Backslashed opening parens for string templating
2. Parameter labels and the use of _ when ignored
3. Splitting method names across opening parens eg. `move (to ....`
4. Verbose NSString Objective-C hangover in regular expressionsRe: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#300It's a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language. Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value propos…
While people can argue swift could be Golang, it's built with focus on iOS ecosystem. You have to manually handle reference cycles. The language is quite complex as well, and compiler is among the slow ones. Copy-on-write is generally despised these days even in C++. Just to keep in mind that this may give space for a next expressive general purpose language that improves in these aspects, we can be optimistic.