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posted by chromas on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the put-it-on-the-block-chain dept.

Deep learning may need a new programming language that’s more flexible and easier to work with than Python, Facebook AI Research director Yann LeCun said today. It’s not yet clear if such a language is necessary, but the possibility runs against very entrenched desires from researchers and engineers, he said.

LeCun has worked with neural networks since the 1980s.

“There are several projects at Google, Facebook, and other places to kind of design such a compiled language that can be efficient for deep learning, but it’s not clear at all that the community will follow, because people just want to use Python,” LeCun said in a phone call with VentureBeat.

“The question now is, is that a valid approach?”

Python is currently the most popular language used by developers working on machine learning projects, according to GitHub’s recent Octoverse report, and the language forms the basis for Facebook’s PyTorch and Google’s TensorFlow frameworks.

[...] Artificial intelligence is more than 50 years old, but its current rise has been closely linked to the growth in compute power provided by computer chips and other hardware.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:58PM (#803732)
    That was assumed a long time ago. Prolog was also in this group. They are known - and rejected by TFA authors. I used your proposed "lots of parentheses" thingy in AutoCad, as it was embedded for scripting. Usable, but weird and overly complex. Then it was in Emacs, right?
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:14PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:14PM (#803747)

    Came here late, was going to say that many early AI researchers used Lisp. They liked it so much that the Lisp hackers at MIT spun off two companies to build special hardware just for the language -- Lisp Machine Inc and Symbolics.

    http://symbolics.com/about.php [symbolics.com] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines -- a hacker parable...

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:53PM (1 child)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:53PM (#803770) Journal

      Came here late, was going to say that many early AI researchers used Lisp.

      Uh, I assumed GGP's reference to lots of parentheses was a clear dig at Lisp (and it's AI role), no?

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 20 2019, @02:21AM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday February 20 2019, @02:21AM (#803816)

        I'm embarrassed to say, I completely forgot Lisp was one of the earlier languages used in AI when I posted that. Well, here we are full circle (or at least two parens).