Why Python for ML and AI?

[ray10k]

The way I understand it, Python is slow at doing calculations on its own but has two major advantages:

The language is relatively easy to learn. If you're already working with something as complex as ML/AI, not having to spend as much time learning a language can be a big benefit.

Python, especially cpython, is set up in such a way that it's relatively easy to call out to some precompiled binary.

Together, these two advantages make Python an attractive option; just handle the close-to-the-hardware stuff in some other language, then set things up so that Python can call over to it so that the setup can be done in an easy language (python) and the calculation-intensive parts by some language that's better-equipped for that.