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A comment on Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft. Parent comment

Re:Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft by stingraycharles on Thursday October 12, 2017 @01:18PM (#15459547)
That doesn’t sound like a very satisfying reason to me. Isn’t a ByteArrayBuffer in Java pretty much the same (its underlying implementation is a char[] which can be used directly from C)?

Is there perhaps another factor, such as an existing ecosystem or that it’s widely used in the academic field?

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Re:Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft by agibsonccc on Thursday October 12, 2017 @07:52PM (#15462330)
If you use direct allocation yes. Java has great facilities for direct memory management. (Look at the number of libraries like netty and co that exist). The problem with java is more the friction at getting at some of the lower level apis.

Python just has momentum and a fairly easy to use FFI.

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Re:Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft by pathseeker on Thursday October 12, 2017 @03:53PM (#15460805)
>Is there perhaps another factor, such as an existing ecosystem or that it’s widely used in the academic field?

Yes, it's widely used in science in general. Don't underestimate the learning curves of other languages when your audience is scientists and mathematicians. Python is incredibly easy to use, even when using numpy and other scientific tools.

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Re:Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft by genericpseudo on Thursday October 12, 2017 @01:31PM (#15459633)
Python has been the language of choice for many physicists (when not doing Fortran) since the early 2000s.
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