What's the best programming language for learning machine learning? [closed]

Question

I have professional software development background with C/C++/Java. I am learning machine learning, what is the best programming language for learning machine learning? R? I remember Andrew Ng mentioned a programming language for learning machine learning in his open course Machine Learning, but I didn't catch that. Does someone catch that?

Answer 1

R Matlab / Octave Python Java Scala

Python is good for initial prototyping and you can check your results very fast. But in the long run, it runs slower than compiled languages like Java

But libraries like http://scikit-learn.org/stable/ make life great using Python

People also use Scala as there are many libraries picking up

If you go to below link there is a good description of the pros and cons of each

http://www.kaggle.com/forums/t/3642/what-tools-do-people-generally-use-to-solve-problems/21728

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