The parent seems to be coming from a skewed background. Most of his suggestions are way too low level. It's like telling a software engineer they must first write an operating system before they can write a web app.

Learn Theano, TensorFlow, and maybe Torch. They'll handle the low level details for you. You just have to know some math to use them.

If you just want to dive in and be immediately productive, you'd be hard pressed to do better than sci-kit learn and keras (for machine learning / deep learning respectively)

You should be equally comfortable with both C and C++.

Sorry I wasn't clear - my question was why do you recommend C and C++ over Python? is it specifically because of the distributed/GPU programming aspect?

I think his meaning was if you're looking to create new ML algorithms, rather than just apply the algorithms of others, you'll need C and C++. If you're just looking to apply the algorithms of others, or if you're 100% sure you'll only be (for example) using TensorFlow to develop new algorithms, Python should work great.

That, and also sometimes writing something in C is the optimal solution (faster than Python, and simpler than trying to modify TensorFlow or Theano backend).