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Comment by MrVitaliy | Hacker News Reader

Compared to WEKA (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/), waffles look inferior. Weka has a much wider variety of classifiers and filters to play with.

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Yeah, but WEKA is a piece of Java bloatware. Waffles looks awesome, especially if they keep it lean and mean and truly try to adhere to the unix philosophy like they say. I'm excited.

I think you are being too harsh on WEKA.

One of the cool things they've taken the trouble to do is to make sure that almost all functionality is accessible from the command line.

As such WEKA is easily scriptable. This is great for integration into bigger projects. It can easily be chained like standard unix tools; I've used this functionality in projects with good success.

Alas, the Java hate. MALLET, Mahout and Lingpipe are written in Java too and don't suffer from it.

Java hate? I never said all Java programs were bloatware, only that WEKA was and that was a distinct difference between Waffles, which is what the OP asked.

I found the phrase 'Java bloatware' to be indicative of a certain sentiment towards the language (or JVM environment) in general (as compared to just 'bloatware'). And, given common use cases for machine learning toolkits, the overhead incurred by the JVM doesn't warrant (IMHO) ruling out Java-based options. I must have misread your comment, thanks for clarifying!

I'll have a look at the underlying C++ classes API (http://waffles.sourceforge.net/apidoc/html/index.html).

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