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Comment by vbuwivbiu | Hacker News Reader

when i read "a language for X" I think "ok...no"

I had the same gut reaction, but fortunately it turns out the article is not about a language intended for humans:

“Our backend produces custom kernels for each specific operation on each GPU. It does this through an intermediate language called Tile. Tile is a simple, compact language for describing machine learning operations in a way that can be efficiently implemented on parallel computing architectures.”

Domain Specific Languages are good thing for specialized applications. Here we want automatic differentiation, parallelization and vectorization. It gets bad when general purpose language's features are added to allow things that the language wasn't designed for. A good interface to a GP language would be more relevant.

What's wrong with domain specific languages? SQL is a language for database manipulation, jq is a language for querying JSON, CSS is a language for styling documents, etc.

it would be more like an SQL for people wanting to do SQL in ML, but its not really what the article is talking about.

i need another language to program machine learning in like i need another hole in my head.

But... that's not what this is. It's a tool to make writing device-agnostic ML frameworks easier. Consumers of said frameworks wouldn't even be aware of it.

> " but its not really what the article is talking about."

Can you state in advance the scope of the domain ? Probably not, hence DSLs tend to grow extensions to cover unforeseen usecases - better to use a library written in a real language.

Honestly, I do too. But this is just a helper language describing kernels. It actually looks nice.

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