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Everyone forgets the obvious fact that python is a default install on most linux distros and many, MANY researchers are in government labs or universities where
by sam0x17 4y ago
Everyone forgets the obvious fact that python is a default install on most linux distros and many, MANY researchers are in government labs or universities where installing software is tightly controlled and are presented with choosing between waiting months to get approval to install something versus starting coding now today in python.. I swear Python rose to popularity in the DL community for this very reason -- for many researchers it was all they could use without a lengthy approval process.
That said I'm no lover of python, I just think this is a huge contributing factor to its rise in popularity. A little conspiracy theory, if you will ;)
- stabbles 4y agoIt doesn't require sudo install, you can just download and extract it and you're done.
- sam0x17 4y agoA lot of DoD labs literally block downloading executable files and source code (I worked at one) unless you fill out a form and wait potentially months for approval. What I describe above is a very real scenario for hundreds of thousands of scientists in the US.
- oivey 4y agoBase (system installed) Python is useless for numerical work, though. You at the very least need NumPy and Matplotlib to do much of anything. If you want to do ML or many other tasks you’ll need many other libraries.