> "I've worked with #engineers of every stripe, age, background, education... and I don't think any of them was stuck on whatever their first language was. In fact, I'm sure of it."
@cazabon@Pitosalas well, it isn't entirely the fault of software engineers. In the world of machine learning Python dominates, and this is because most people with expertise in machine learning have a statistics background, and Python has since become the language of choice for statisticians, and largely because of how it is used as a first language academia.
These statisticians aren't at all interested in software engineering, even though they work entirely in software. They want to get their AUC/ROC curves just right, and they don't care about whether their code is following best practices, only that they can get started using the machine learning framework without learning any new languages.
It used to be Matlab and R, but thanks to Google and Facebook both independently deciding on Python as the scripting language for their machine learning frameworks (Tensorflow and PyTorch, respetively), everyone uses Python now, and because it is used everywhere, people look at me sideways wheneve I try to explain to them that Python is probably not the best language to use if you want to create a nice fancy GUI around your awesome Python machine-learning program.