It seems to me the reason for insisting on a verbose declaritivization of everything is obvious: it guarantees you can build run/traintime environments which sc

It seems to me the reason for insisting on a verbose declaritivization of everything is obvious: it guarantees you can build run/traintime environments which scale your model automatically. Google’s mindset isn’t “train this model to multiply by three”. It’s “train this model on a 1% sample of search traffic over the last year.” That’s reflected in the design choices of tensorflow.