Engineers at Google have unveiled Dex, a prototype functional language designed for array processing. Array processing is a cornerstone of the math used in machine learning applications and other computationally intensive work.
The chief goal for the Dex language, according to a paper released by Google researchers, is to allow programmers to work efficiently and concisely with arrays using a compact, functional syntax.
Existing math-and-stats languages and libraries, such as MATLAB and NumPy, already have widely used array processing techniques and syntaxes, as do more general purpose languages such as Fortran and C. But the paper’s authors were unhappy with the “obfuscated” feel of the former and the “heaviness” of the latter.
