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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

This is probably related to explosion of interest in AI and deep learning (DL), because Python has become THE standard language for AI/DL research.

Most AI frameworks support Python out of the box, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2, which together currently have the most developer mindshare. Every single TensorFlow, Pytorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2 tutorial or example is written in Python.

With very few exceptions (e.g., the occasional Lua code coming out of Yann Le Cun's group at FB), new AI papers come with code written in Python.

If you want to see Python's utter dominance in this field, just search for "deep learning" or "neural net" on github.

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This is true. Even the Le Cunn group has switched to PyTorch I think.

It's also because no one can work out how to use matplotlib properly, so you need to look at about 1000 StackOverflow questions per line of code.

To be fair, this was also true when I was using Matlab back before switching to Python (2006ish!), except you had to dig through documentation instead of just having everything immediately available on SO. :)

the matlab documentation, imo, is the best technical documentation ever written for anything. if your background was more math-heavy then the docs provided easy to understand translation between recognizable mathematical idioms into code (if matlab wasn't already very math-idiomatic).

and back in 2010 or so, python's numerical optimization libraries left a lot to be desired, and totally hopeless compared to matlab. (edit, i don't remember it being nearly as good as octave, which wasn't particularly good either back then).

Matlab's documentation is really good, except when you need to look at the algorithm and can't because it's closed-source...

hmm... no? I think you can hit ctrl-d or some shortcut like that to go straight into the code of the function that you are interested in, and it can be functions written by matlab.

And rich countries are ahead of the curve in data science, AI and DL.

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