Thanks for highlighting XArray in your other comments. Yup, XArray is great. As are Dex and the various libraries for named axis DL programming within PyTorch and Jax. I never said these things don't exist -- I even mention them in the linked blog series!

But I do think it's fair to say they are in their infancy, and there is a missing theoretical framework to explain what is going on.

I anticipate name-free array programming will eventually be considered a historical curiosity for most purposes, and everyone will wonder how we put up without it for so long.