Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?

• CPython

  1,314 59,531 10.0 Python

  The Python programming language

  

The most insane thing about Python is how you can override single methods in classes and use the class like normal. One time I was working on getting FIFO working on Windows, and none of the Python built-ins were set up to handle any random process writing to a named pipe that wasn't within the same Python instance. So what I did was I took the closest implementation Python offered, which was in the multiprocessing module [1], and overrode a single one of the methods to do what I wanted it to do. The module still handled all of the cleanup so I was confident there weren't any memory leak issues, and I was able to make a simple change to the flags it was passing Windows to allow for the functionality I wanted. A language that has a hackable standard library itself is insane and I don't think I've seen it on any other language.

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/multiprocess...

• LuaJIT

  39 4,396 8.9 C

  Mirror of the LuaJIT git repository

  

LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3 -- Copyright (C) 2005-2017 Mike Pall. http://luajit.org/

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• root

  31 2,418 10.0 C++

  The official repository for ROOT: analyzing, storing and visualizing big data, scientifically

  

I can only provide anecdotal material, but back in 2007-2014 when I was a particle physics researcher, we saw a high uptake of python for steering data analysis jobs. The actual calculations were done in C++. Gradually over the years, as more students joined the LHC conquest, our tools evolved to allow more of the analyses to be directly programmed in Python. R was never a thing among the 10000+ physicists in our community. These people have since then drifted around the world working on Big Data, ML and recently Data Science. It’s hard to keep count, but I routinely recognize fellow particle physicists at various ML companies.

For the curious, our primary hammer was “ROOT” https://root.cern - note its well-evolved ability to connect Python and C++ code.

• python-0.9.1

  5 165 0.0 C

  Upload and changes to Python 0.9.1 release (from 1991!) so that it would compile

https://github.com/smontanaro/python-0.9.1 (I think this is from 1990 or so)

   This is Python, an extensible interpreted programming language that

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