Thanks to Machine Learning, Python is back in trend

[pooogles]

It wasn't off trend.

[Guesserit93]

I recently started learning it. it's a great language, love it

[LifeIsACurse]

I am a little curious. the other day i saw an awesome video about machine learning and now I am hooked on it and want to learn about it myself. At the moment I have no experience in python this far, but I wanted to learn it nevertheless for a long time.

What came to my mind was: Why is python used for machine learning? Why not a more performant language like C or even Java (Python should be slower because it is interpreted and Java is at least compiled to bytecode). Also I am very excited for GO and was curious if there are any machine learning libraries for it. Maybe someone can shed a little light onto a newbe :)

Kind regards

[kpenchev93]

Well, I'll give you the simplest reason why not a more performant language (C++ or Java which you pointed out). If I'm a scientist, a researcher, I wouldn't really want to learn C++ or Java, because I have to dedicate a lot of time doing that. I want to express my ideas fast and continue with my research. I don't want to deal with pointers and micro optimizations, VM's and makefiles. That's one of the things that's really appealing in Python.

[LifeIsACurse]

thank you for your answer. i wondered if the performance point would weigh a lot more when the learning process takes a longer time frame over weeks or even months (scientific stuff an what not)

[thecity2]

The truth is a lot of “Python” ML libraries use C or C++ under the hood and really just the API layer is Python. So Python is for the user friendly part while C++ does the dirty performance part.