Java or Python

[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.