Python is the default in many fields beside ML, however ML has its own very efficient languages, I recently discovered octave through a course I attended.
Really worth having a look at https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index is mostly compatible with matlab.
Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#22Another way to analyze the problem: what other language would it have been, given the moment ml hit?
You say compared to other scripting languages'. Let's list them.
Ruby: no numeric support Go: unnecessary typing, modest numeric support, shitty generics Bash: ha ha ha Scala, java, c, cpp: not a scripting language, complex Tcl, php: out of favor Rust: hadn't happened yet R: in memory bias, not as simple Other languages were obscure or owned by monoliths (kotlin, swift, c#)
Python also has multiple implementations, a minor thing, but not really. Pypy keeps cython on its toes.
C# really could be a contender. I am more productive in c# than any other language except python (although I think I will be more productive in rust)
Python is, almost unarguably, the easiest language to code in, right now, period. It has the greatest expressiveness and the simplest syntax. I use it for large scale open source art projects, and you can use it for ai.
Why are you asking?
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#23Because Python has NumPy, which implements vectorized math on arrays and matrices. Machine learning algorithms are implemented naturally and efficiently with those primitives. PyTorch, TensorFlow, and I think every other machine learning framework in Python all use NumPy. JavaScript, Ruby, and Perl either don't have this abstraction at all, or they have much weaker versions of it, and many fewer scientific libraries.…
Ruby does have operator overloading.
And it is kind of sad to me that Python is so much more popular than it, even though Ruby has a much cleaner object-oriented foundation. Not to speak of underscores...
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of "most ML people" Some of the biggest distributed systems built today are used for statistical inference or scientific computation Most "ML people" I know are highly versatile in software, networks and deep hardware knowledge, i.e., essentially they have a very good understanding of what a computer is and what is capable from Its very naive to think that you can assemble mach…
Ethical hackers have written some of the worst code I’ve ever seen. They have to know a ton about the security of frameworks, networking, etc… it’s a very complex role for sure, but they are not shining beacons of software engineering quality
I agree. Their objective is not to build beautiful code but to provide a working prototype
I'm sure every single one of them is capable of writing world class code if they feel like it
Their exploits are world class and their focus is to exploit
I have seen stuff in JavaScript exploitation that I can't even scratch the surface. I feel like I have been playing piano for 15 years and I can't even understand if that a music that is playing
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of "most ML people" Some of the biggest distributed systems built today are used for statistical inference or scientific computation Most "ML people" I know are highly versatile in software, networks and deep hardware knowledge, i.e., essentially they have a very good understanding of what a computer is and what is capable from Its very naive to think that you can assemble mach…
The most insane thing about Python is how you can override single methods in classes and use the class like normal. One time I was working on getting FIFO working on Windows, and none of the Python built-ins were set up to handle any random process writing to a named pipe that wasn't within the same Python instance. So what I did was I took the closest implementation Python offered, which was in the multiprocessing m…
> The most insane thing about Python is how you can override single methods in classes and use the class like normal.
Isn't that true of basically every language supporting class-based OOP and inheritance?
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#26Another way to analyze the problem: what other language would it have been, given the moment ml hit? You say compared to other scripting languages'. Let's list them. Ruby: no numeric support Go: unnecessary typing, modest numeric support, shitty generics Bash: ha ha ha Scala, java, c, cpp: not a scripting language, complex Tcl, php: out of favor Rust: hadn't happened yet R: in memory bias, not as simple Other languag…
I left out JavaScript. It is not a simple language, with it's service heritage. It is bound up in the node runtime in a way that doesn't really work right for data processing.
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#27Another way to analyze the problem: what other language would it have been, given the moment ml hit? You say compared to other scripting languages'. Let's list them. Ruby: no numeric support Go: unnecessary typing, modest numeric support, shitty generics Bash: ha ha ha Scala, java, c, cpp: not a scripting language, complex Tcl, php: out of favor Rust: hadn't happened yet R: in memory bias, not as simple Other languag…
I left out JavaScript. It is not a simple language, with it's service heritage. It is bound up in the node runtime in a way that doesn't really work right for data processing.
lol, you forgot perl too.
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#28Another way to analyze the problem: what other language would it have been, given the moment ml hit? You say compared to other scripting languages'. Let's list them. Ruby: no numeric support Go: unnecessary typing, modest numeric support, shitty generics Bash: ha ha ha Scala, java, c, cpp: not a scripting language, complex Tcl, php: out of favor Rust: hadn't happened yet R: in memory bias, not as simple Other languag…
Non ML/AI coder here:
Why does ML/AI work need to be written in a scripting language?
Why can’t it be something like C++ etc instead?
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#29At the time when ML craze hit, python was already very popular as a beginners language and had good numeric libraries.
Many people of STEM fields without any programming background, had their first taste of programming with python. And it caught on.
Also, the real stuff is probably written in C/C++/CUDA/ASM. Its only the interface that is python (because of its inertial popularity)
Re: Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?
#30NumPy, SciPy and the ecosystem around them. So much of what you do in ML involves matrix operations. People used to do this stuff in Matlab. Matlab is good at numerics but it's not a very good programming language, and doesn't have very good libraries outside of the numeric domain. The open source nature of NumPy and Python encouraged a big open source community that is hard to get going if you're building open source on top of a language that costs thousands of dollars per seat.
Python's dynamic nature also made a lot of what's in NumPy and the various ML libraries possible or more convenient to use. The performance is not as much of an issue if you start thinking in NumPy terms, doing operations on whole arrays where the loops are then in C. Really, Python itself is just acting as orchestration for a bunch of C code that's doing all the work. In the case of something like Tensorflow or PyTorch, it's actually a bunch of CUDA code that's doing all the work and orchestrated by Python.