Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#1

Post by aphextron » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:33 AM UTC

I'm interested in building an AI which can take inputs of world events and financial news and make trading decisions. What language has the best libraries and idiomatic features for this?

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#2

Post by ghayashi » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

Python has sophisticated ML tools and Neural Net packages, I'm honestly not sure what they are called in Python land, but I see Python on the listings all the time for the top ML libraries. Clojure may also have really great frameworks available by now.

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#3

Post by physicsyogi » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:03 AM UTC

ghayashi wrote: post #2

Python has sophisticated ML tools and Neural Net packages, I'm honestly not sure what they are called in Python land, but I see Python on the listings all the time for the top ML libraries. Clojure may also have really great frameworks available by now.

Clojure has Flare[1] and Cortex[2] for machine learning. Clojure is also a great language for data processing.

Python, of course, gives you access to a host of useful libraries for NLP (SpaCy[3], NLTK, Textacy), machine learning (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Tensorflow), and more general data processing (Pandas) and visualization (Matplotlib, Seaborn).

[1]: https://github.com/aria42/flare/blob/master/README.md [2]: https://github.com/thinktopic/cortex [3]: https://spacy.io/index

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#4

Post by boidcom » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:56 AM UTC

Python + Tensorflow. Not only for the software but the community and resources. Hardware tensor units in the latest Nvidia GPUs can reduce computing time substantially.

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#5

Post by rwieruch » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 7:16 AM UTC

If you are into JavaScript, checkout this article for ML in JS [0]. JavaScript is not suited for AI, but if you happen to know it already and just want to do ML for yourself, you can try it out in the browser.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/machine-learning-javascript-web-...

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#6

Post by Aryal007 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 8:25 AM UTC

Without a doubt python. I have been doing Machine Learning and Neural Network Programming for over a year now. Availability of good libraries such as scikit-learn and tensorflow along with the easiness of python makes python the go-to language for AI programming in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#7

Post by raresp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

I guess that AIML ( Artificial Intelligence Markup Language ) is the first option when it comes to AI.

This article might help - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_...

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#8

Post by TheAlchemist » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:00 PM UTC

Python, hands down. By far the best tools, community, documentation etc. Although if you are looking for something 'high frequency' you will need to implement the stuff on the critical fast path in something faster.

PS. What you want to do is called Machine Learning, not AI

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#9

Post by amitprayal » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:01 PM UTC

Prolog

Re: Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

#10

Post by olavgg » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:22 PM UTC

I think Python with scikit-learn, nltk, numpy, jupyter and finally Keras for deep learning is a great combination.

I highly recommend learning Keras before you dive into Tensorflow or PyTorch. Currently there are some excellent video tutorials available on http://safaribooksonline.com/ with some good examples available here: https://github.com/the-deep-learners/TensorFlow-LiveLessons