They seem to be saying, they could have picked Julia, but were just more familiar with Swift:
> and picked Swift over Julia because Swift has a much larger community, is syntactically closer to Python, and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details - which allowed us to implement a prototype much faster.
I think it's very debatable to claim Swift is more similar to Python syntactically, as Julia looks more like a dynamic language to the user. Also, Julia is closer to languages like Matlab and R, which many mathematical and scientific programmers are coming from.
Swift has a much larger community, but it's not clear how big the overlap is between iOS app developers and Machine Learning developers. It probably would make deploying models on iOS devices easier, however.
> and picked Swift over Julia because Swift has a much larger community, is syntactically closer to Python, and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details - which allowed us to implement a prototype much faster.
I think it's very debatable to claim Swift is more similar to Python syntactically, as Julia looks more like a dynamic language to the user. Also, Julia is closer to languages like Matlab and R, which many mathematical and scientific programmers are coming from.
Swift has a much larger community, but it's not clear how big the overlap is between iOS app developers and Machine Learning developers. It probably would make deploying models on iOS devices easier, however.