A quote from your own link. So they admit Julia might be a good fit. The only argument they gave is the "small community size", which is wrong, because Julia data science and any other computational science community is way bigger to almost non-existent Swift one.
> picked Swift over Julia because Swift has a much larger community, is syntactically closer to Python, and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details
So Julia could match well, but the team at Google determined that Swift was a better fit for their new TensorFlow platform.
> and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details - which allowed us to implement a prototype much faster.
In any case, both Julia and Swift seem to be making good progress here and I wish them both the best.
How is Swift's syntax in any way similar to Python? Other than not having semicolons, they clearly belong to different language families and don't seem particularly similar. Is there some very specific feature they were referring to here?