> Note that the article has a comment by Yann LeCun (hopefully it's not an impersonator).
i wouldnt be surprised if it was lecun. colah's illustrations on nonlinear transformations have made it into several lecun papers, including the following [nature review]( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14539).
Many mentions of Python, none of Numba, which does a good job of jitting Python with LLVM.
It seems unlikely though that an entire modeling community could rally behind a single language or framework, given all the possibilities, many of which are commercially oriented. But one I’ve used recently with a lot of flexibility is Loopy
When you pass a differentiable function into fold -- or most higher order functions, for that matter -- you get a function that is differentiable on everything but a measure zero set.
The mechanics of how you compute the derivatives are separate from this. Obviously, the efficient way is to use backprop (reverse mode AD), as we always do in deep learning. But you could also use discrete derivative approximations. The point is that the resulting function is differentiable, which is independent of how you compute the derivatives.
I'm also starting work on a set of bindings to libdarknet for Idris with similar properties.