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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone got experience in using other things than python for machine learning? What are the rivals out there?

Particularly outside deep learning, R remains popular especially for those closer to the stats world.

Matlab and Mathematica both have interesting machine learning features but are probably orders of magnitude lower usage levels compared to Python.

In my experience: Julia, Java, C++. Lack of libraries in a pain; OTOH the quality of most libraries (in general) tends to be poor.

Examples of library issues: there is C++ support in tensor flow, but not for training.

Agree to that completely. It is also hard for the libraries to spend their energy / time in building for languages that covers only a few percentage of total users. :(

For anything involving differential equations, Julia is way better than anything else. I also wouldn't be at all surprised if Julia catches up to python for way more machine learning within the next year

Julia doesn't lack libraries and the quality imo is pretty good. Did you look at PyCall.jl?

Interesting! I did not yet! will take a look. I remember swift was working on something similar to seamlessly call Python.

There is a rather active community for Go in data science and machine learning. +1700 members on the #data-science channel on the Gopher slack, a few books on the topic, and a few libraries:

Books

Machine learning with Go - https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Classification-Time-...

Go Machine Learning Projects - https://www.amazon.com/Go-Machine-Learning-Projects-Ultimate...

Libraries

https://gorgonia.org/

https://www.gonum.org/

A good talk (although from a from years back), explaining why Go for ML could be a good idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5tDubyXLrQ

I'm using Julia instead of Python for NLP and it's great. If I need a python library I just use PyCall and so far it has worked flawlessly.

Can you say a bit about the advantages of each? I'm just starting to learn deep learning and planning to use it for NLP. I'm taking the python-based fast.ai course. But I'm tempted by the elegance of Julia.

If you're starting you should use Python and when you have a more solid grasp you can switch to Julia. That's mostly due to the fact that there are much more tutorials and resources for dl in python.

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