Comment by munchler
12 hours ago
I have to agree with this as someone coming from a strongly-typed background (F#). PyTorch and NumPy are very flexible and powerful, but their API’s are insanely underspecified because every function seems to take multiple combinations of vaguely-typed objects. The library just figures out the right thing to do at runtime using broadcasting or other magic.
This kind of “clever” API seems to be both a benefit and curse of the Python ecosystem in general. It makes getting started very easy, but also makes mastery maddeningly difficult.
Broadcasting is a useful and powerful feature. It's precisely specified and easily learned. However, very few type systems in real world languages are powerful enough to express the concept of broadcasting in the type system.
Broadcasting is good, but would be nice if it were explicit.
Maybe it being explicit gets in the way and become inelegant once you get some experience.