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Comment by bionhoward | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript is such a cool language, and I really love it, especially the FP subcommunity, but the AI community for Python is way bigger, I wish there were more options for neural nets, differentiable programming, and data frame type things in JS. The interoperability with WASM is hugely valuable, and so is the ability to easily publish results on the web. It feels like it’s way easier to make an AI system in python, but then you have to figure out how to monetize it, while if you use JS, you can build a web platform or service and monetize much easier. Thoughts?

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I think you're talking about two different systems and two different problems. First, there's the core service code, the AI system in Python you're talking about. Then, there's the web platform or service that you monetize. But there's no reason why you wouldn't just use both.

Write the core AI code in Python because that's what's practical to do. Write the app code in JS because that's what's practical to do. Sell the product to customers that want to use it and probably don't care what's underneath.

In my opinion it would be great to have a single language for developer productivity. Backend and frontend can be already written fully in TypeScript and you can share interfaces between frontend and backend so everything is connected and business logic is not repeated. Same thing could be done for machine learning.

If backend changes frontend has to change as well or compiler will yell. Same for machine learning input and output.

I think these are two different languages for two different jobs.

I can see javascript slowly expanding from the front-end into the back-end, mostly thanks to projects like TypeScript that appeal to the back-end crowds, but also because of the whole serverless hype which IMO is justified.

Now there still is a strong "cultural divide" between the software and the data-science communities. And when you see how strong the innertia for python's projects is.. Well I guess we won't see this changing anytime soon.

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