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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Arguing that Rust, C++, Julia or D are a better "right tool for the job" than Python for a book that teaches people about LLMs is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

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How so? Since when is Python a good language for numerical computation? What if the reader wants to try something that cannot be achieved by plumbing canned C++? They are out of luck I guess.

Good job teaching the sloppy semantics of a scripting language for numerics I guess.

"Since when is Python a good language for numerical computation?"

30 years. Numeric came out in 1995, then evolved into NumPy in 2005. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumPy

Almost every AI researcher and AI lab does most of their research work in Python.

I know all of these facts. Doesn't mean it is how it is for the right reasons, and even if it is, it does not imply that it is a good way to teach.

Taking constant side-quests into Rust memory management during a class on LLMs doesn't sound like a productive way to teach to me.

It is possible that the vast majority of AI researchers are flat-out incorrect and need to be shown a better direction by you.

It is also possible that your own fitness-for-purpose coefficients are tuned differently than the majority of the field and they've made a sensible choice for their situation.

I'd wager on the latter.

You can all raise your eyebrows and appeal to authority all you want. Doesn't change the fact that as soon as I want to write a tight (or not so tight) loop to do something that is not covered by all these (undoubtedly great) libraries running underneath, I am very probably out of luck and have to use another language.

Doesn't sound like a very creative teaching environment to me.

Not to mention that, depending on what you count as "AI research", the vast majority of it is pure garbage (come on, we all know this).

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