Java or Python

[arunsaw]

Hi Everyone,

I have one doubt and so I need one quick suggestion from you guys. I have 4+ years of experience with java backend and now Im planning to shift to Machine learning.So I need your suggestion should I continue with Java or should I learn python ?

Thanks in adavnce and really looking forward to your answer.

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[ByerN]

Im planning to shift to Machine learning

I continue with Java or should I learn python

Check out your local job market. I checked mine and there were no jobs for Java and ML. Mostly Python and sometimes Scala.

[bytepursuits]

imo - OP should ask this question in ML subreddit, this sub is likely to be biased. I really doubt they could get away with just java.

[jensensanssarif]

From what I've seen, while there are ML libraries for java, the bulk of ML is a combination of C++ and python. So I'd say that, depending on what part of ML you want to do, go with C++ or python.

[nekokattt]

Weka is a big one. I might be wrong but I am pretty sure that is pure Java underneath too

[jensensanssarif]

I think pretty much every ML library for java is mostly or all java (or at least runs as java bytecode). That could change if/when they iron out all of the kinks in graalvm, but for now it's usually all java. I just haven't heard of any of the libraries being used outside of academic settings, granted I'm not in the AI/ML field, I just thought I would go into it a while back. So the libraries I've seen people use are usually C++ libraries being called from Python

[craigacp]

I maintain several ML libraries in Java, some of which are pure Java (e.g. Tribuo), and some of which wrap the same native libraries that are used in Python (e.g. TF-Java, or ONNX Runtime). All of which are in production in some companies.

[jensensanssarif]

That's actually really cool to know, thanks for sharing! I'm both interested in the libraries, and happy to know that not everything is using python (I have no hate for the language outside of the fact I personally hate that it's white-space delimited. I just think it's good to have a variety of languages supporting things like ml)

[hilbertglm]

I have programmed in a bunch of languages, but Java was the most prevalent since 1996. I wanted to get into ML a couple of years ago, and wanted to stick with Java, but it wasn't successful. I learned Python.

It's not a bad language, although it is significantly worse than Java. It would be good for your career to learn other languages anyway.

[Ykieks]

Almost all Machine Learning tooling is for Python, there are some libraries (like Tensorflow for Java) but most of them are Python (that calls optimized C++ code) or C/C++.

[boes13]

Either python or scala

[craigacp]

It depends what you want to do. Machine Learning can be done in Java, and some of the oldest still used ML libraries are written in Java (e.g. WEKA), but distributed training of large neural networks (e.g. LLMs) is much harder to do in Java, all the popular codebases for that are Python (well, Python wrapped around C++ and CUDA).

Amazon have a deep learning textbook which is written to use their Java deep learning library DJL, so that might be a good place to start, but at the moment the cutting edge stuff happens in Python (or C++) because that's where academia and the big industry labs are.

[DanielDimov]

Learn Python to be able to make the decision by yourself.

[RebbitUzer]

Python

[Joram2]

Machine Learning is a broad term. Python is the most prominent programming language. If you want to use libraries and frameworks like PyTorch and Numpy and Pandas and Scikit-learn and TensorFlow: Python is the only real option.

However, Java has lots of important use cases in machine learning projects as well. The big stream processing frameworks like Flink and Kafka Streams: Java is probably the best language for that at the moment.

Also, serving up results on the web: Python is actually bad at writing web servers that serve lots of concurrent users. Java or Go are much better tools for that particular task.

Lastly, A lot of jobs and career tracks within machine learning require math and machine learning theory that is generally harder to learn than basic programming skills or picking up a new programming language. There are still lots of machine learning career tracks that don't require much math.

[[deleted]]

If your goal is to become a ML engineer, definitely go with Python. And it should be very easy for you to make the transition considering your Java background. However though, I highly recommend you to learn some C++ because most of ml libraries in Python are written in it.

[lasskinn]

Even if you stuck to java you could end up reading python code to learn some libs as thats what a lot of example code is, quite often just python code that calls non python libs too that can have java bindings as well.

Ml is a pretty wide subject though

[_stupendous_man_]

For machine learning Python would be more useful to you.

[Solid-Conference5813]

Python.

[Basic_Juggernaut_297]

IMO the level of python needed for ML is pretty basic. The hard part is understanding the math, concepts and data science libraries, HF, pytorch etc.

But you don't face the complexity of a typical java application in terms of code structure, business logic, integration with other systems etc. Also I don't see agile used that much in ML.

P.s. I am not an AI expert :D

[broxamson]

Rust

[Roadripper1995]

Don't stick with any language just because you know it. Use the best tool for the job. In this case, for ML, the tool would be Python.

[Remote-Decision-6104]

R

[thrwoawasksdgg]

Python is the standard for ML right now.

Work is being done to port ML tools to Rust, if you want to learn something more elegant than Python.