The ideas of APL and its successors, the array programming languages, were two generations ahead of their time.  These languages are based on the notion that everything is a tensor, and all operations are rank-polymorphic: they extend automatically to tensors of any rank. These ideas are perfectly suited to an era of machine learning, large scale data, GPUs and other accelerators. Building on recent academic research, we are building ShapeRank, a new statically typed, purely functional language for industrial use, that extends rank-polymorphism to streams. We’ll introduce the key ideas and show how they are realized in ShapeRank.

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5 Networks, and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications, and the Dart Programming Language. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.