I suppose this can be compared to standardising SQL. However that has ended up with a least common denominator of simple operations and dozens of specialised dialects. Better than before the standard but certainly not great and tons of engineering has gone into cross dialect facades.

Granted I haven't thought as long or as hard as the authors but I wonder if there are easier ways to go about this:

a) something akin to slf4j or one of the many unifying facades in java b) standardising the data structures/formats. eg Arrow has done quite a good job positioning itself as a data lingua franca and has compute primitives.

Regardless, I will be watching with interest!