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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:22PM (1 child)
There are thousands of programming languages, and dissatisfied people are still inventing more, for the good reason that the whole menagerie leaves much to be desired.
Building on existing languages seems to be in vogue this decade. One way is the transcompiler to turn source code in their pet language into source code in a mainstream language. We're not talking merely libraries such as jQuery, There's TypeScript, CoffeScript, LiveScript, and several others that transcompile to JavaScript. Another way is to tie into existing libraries. Kotlin is able to connect to java and Android libraries.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @12:09AM
RatFor forever!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor [wikipedia.org]