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Deep Learning May Need a New Programming Language That's More Flexible Than Python, Facebook's Chief AI Scientist Says (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the in-pursuit-of-a-better-language 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. From an interview: 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?" Further reading: Facebook joins Amazon and Google in AI chip race.

2 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Easy by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1, Troll

    You clearly don't understand C, or what constititues a runtime environment.

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  2. we have no data, and hence don't know anything by doom · · Score: 1, Troll

    I say this every other day in one form or another, but let me try again: we all keep jumping up and down and shouting about whether we need a more flexible language or a fussier language with super-strong type-checking and encapsulation and what not, and some are deeply convinced that Pythons's fascist attitude toward formatting is excellent, and some are not -- one of the reaons the Go project was started, from what I understand, was to get away from syntactic whitespace--

    None of us really know who's right about any of this, because to really find out someone would need to do experiments, and designing these experiments would require knowledge of social science techniques, and "Computer Scientists" refuse to consider doing that kind of science, because most of them are really mathematicians in disguise.

    So we're stuck with a religious fervour for concepts like "elegance" without any real reason to believe any of it is right.