[hogu]

Just to set some context - this is being driven by Quansight which is led by Travis Oliphant, who united Numeric and Numarray to create NumPy many years ago which lead to the entire python data science ecosystem as we know it. Yes it's ambitious, and they may not succeed, but it's not their first barbecue. Unifying communities and APIs is something they're good at.

[hogu]

For some context on why this matters, if you're writing a library (like sklearn) and you want to support multiple array types, you might need to do stuff like

  if isinstance(x, ndarray):
      ...
  elif isinstance(x, other_array):
      ...

In the most ideal case having the standard means that scientific libraries can support all conforming implementations by default. Then sklearn would automatically support cupy/numpy/dask/jax/mxnet/pytorch/tensorflow arrays. Multiply that by all the scientific libraries and the effect is pretty profound.