S4TF lost out, not to Python, but to Python's AI/ML ecosystem -- people, projects, libraries, frameworks.<p>Despite its many shortcomings, Python has become the <i>lingua franca</i> of AI and ML, to the point that whenever I come across a newly published AI or ML paper that I find interesting, I <i>expect</i> to be able to find code implementing it in Python.<p>For example, yesterday I saw a post on HN about approximating self-attention matrices in transformers, which have O(n²) computational cost, with a seemingly clever approach that has O(n) computational cost: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105455" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105455</a> . "Huh, that looks interesting," I thought, "let me see if I can find some code." Three clicks later, I found myself at <a href="https://github.com/mlpen/Nystromformer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mlpen/Nystromformer</a> -- the official implementation... in Python. A few moments later, I was playing with this thingamajiggy. No other language comes close to having this kind of ecosystem in AI and ML.<p>Julia still has a shot at becoming a viable alternative to Python, especially if the Julia developers can shorten the "time to first interactive plot" to make it as fast as Python's, but they face an uphill battle against such an entrenched ecosystem.