[dual_basis]

Reading the link, it seems that Jeremy Howard only tried out Swift because Swift for Tensorflow existed. I got the impression from your comment that using Swift for this purpose was somehow "in-the-air" at the time, and many people independently considered it, but I don't think this is true. My impression is quite the contrary - when they announced Tensorflow support for Swift, I think many people were surprised.

[taharvey]

In his lecture, he specifically said he interviewed both the Swift and Julia teams and got a view inside what happening at Google... and the the Swift teams work, development, and vision was well beyond what the Julia team had even envisioned.

[ChrisRackauckas]

Interesting since the manifesto hasn't mentioned something that's not already completed in Julia. Is their main project or motivation something that is not being shared? I find it quite odd that this manifesto doesn't mention anything that actually requires differentiable programming (old adjoint equations for their applications have existed since the 90's), which makes it a very odd justification for this work.