Came here to say this. Tensors are the wrong level of abstraction, because they're just matrices, which are just arrays. The best tool I've used for vector/mat

Came here to say this. Tensors are the wrong level of abstraction, because they're just matrices, which are just arrays. The best tool I've used for vector/matrix processing is MATLAB (or GNU Octave, which is free but without as many libraries). To say I'm disappointed that these never gained the same traction as Python would be an understatement. Unfortunately, these tools all suffer from a lack of insight from programmers. We abstract whenever possible, but for whatever reason, academics have a certain expectation that the user learn the entire system before starting. I believe that's why functional programming never quite caught on. That egocentric view infects everything from Mathematica/WolframAlpha to UNIX. I prefer other models. For example, I don't feel that anyone has explored genetic algorithms under the Actor model yet. Which severely limits how fast the user can explore a problem space. Part of that is due to hardware. A GPU may present itself as having X number of teraflops or whatever, but only have something like 64 cores and no API to access them directly like a CPU. Which limits it to a paltry number of environments and/or automatons to evolve. A better architecture would be something like 1024+ symmetric cores with a unified copy-on-write, content-addressable memory accessible through ordinary C desktop programming and orchestrated with something like Docker. Then we could explore auto-parallelization with languages like Julia and Clojure, possibly even Rust. I've written about that extensively throughout the years, but there's still been no change to the status quo, so I've all but given up on that. I do see a small hope with RISC-V on FPGA though. The somewhat ironic thing is that AI is evolving so quickly that it's passed the Turing test now for the masses. We only have maybe 5-20 years before it solves all problems better than us. So it's an odd feeling for me to have waited 20 years with no progress on the hardware that I needed to do what I wanted to do, only to make the thing I wanted to do irrelevant anyway. That's the challenge we all face now as play is automated by AI while we still have to go to work and pay rent within a 20th century Matrix reality. I hope we find a way to reverse that trend before we're too old to care anyway.