News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Idea of Lisp by AnimalMuppet on Friday December 16, 2016 @12:06PM (#13194727)
Could you explain what you mean by the "base rate" popularity?
Re:The Idea of Lisp by edanm on Saturday December 17, 2016 @06:23AM (#13200250)
Pretty much what czinck said.

Python is much more popular in general, which makes it more likely to be popular in any specific subfield, for various reasons:

1. More chance that people who decide to do anything in ML already use Python.

2. There's better existing support for various ML-related tasks in Python.

3. There's a larger audience available for ML-related things in Python, therefore people think it's more worthwhile to code things in it.

etc.

Re:The Idea of Lisp by czinck on Friday December 16, 2016 @12:39PM (#13195054)
I'm not the parent poster, but I'm pretty sure they're saying that because Python is more popular in general (the base rate) it's more popular in AI/ML/whatever circles because of better general support (more tutorials, more libraries, more people already know it before trying to use it for a specific problem).