Sad but true

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

The documentation for the matplotlib python library is terrible for newbies.

There is a "Tutorial" section, but the thing doesn't even explain what you can do until you get to the 4th section!
It starts off with some confusing examples, how to change the appearance and only at section 4 do you actually start to get an introduction to the different components you might want to use...

At some point you finally realize, most of the stuff that is shown can be omitted because the .pyplot module is all you need.

i was learning neural networks, started with keras and was on the first tutorial where they started by importing pandas
so i switched to learning data analysis using pandas in Python where they started by importing matplotlib and i realized data visualization is also important and now I'm reading matplotlib docs...🙄

So matplotlib can do 3d plots. However, when you try to then label your axes...
plt.xlabel("protocol") # ok
plt.ylabel("volume") # ok
plt.zlabel("time") # error: no such method zlabel (ಠ_ಠ)

This is why I don't use and will probably never use Python.

Back in the uni days, I had a very important assignment. It determined whether I was going to the fourth grade from the third or not. It involved math and charting. It was very complex, and I spent a very long time on research, naturally. I knew Python 3, and I decided to use it. The only lib I needed was matplotlib, which I installed with pip. So I did the whole thing, tested it again at home, closed my laptop and was ready to go. My laptop used Windows 7 and was set up to ignore the lid closing. When I closed it, nothing would happen, even the screen stayed on. When I arrived at the lab, I opened my laptop, hit Ctrl + B as usual… and matplotlib import wasn't working. I obviously panicked, I tried to do something about it, but it just kept throwing an import error. Reinstalling the library didn't help. My friends too weren't able to help me. It just wasn't working, and that was it.

I failed the assignment, automatically. I had nothing to show. This was the first time I failed anything in the uni. Later I rewrote the code in C++ with Qt plotting library, and everything worked fine.

I never used Python since. I did everything uni with C++, and later with JavaScript. I don't care if it was Windows error or Python's. My Windows install was clean, I reinstalled it pretty much every year and kept the default settings. My laptop was for studying purposes only, and all my personal life happened on my desktop.

I didn't use exotic things like PyPy. It was just Python 3, the most basic, official installation. If you promote your fucking language as a cross-platform solution, please be bothered to make its basic behaviour stable on the most popular OS out there.

I will probably never use Python again. Maybe this issue was addressed and fixed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it never would've happened on Linux or Mac. I don't care. It's like maintaining friendship with a person that betrayed you. I just can't do it.

JS and NPM never failed me.

I'm not a data scientist but lately I've learned NumPy, Pandas and now I'm learning Matplotlib and Seaborn and after years of Excel the improvement is astounding.

Excel is far easier to approach (I casually use it since I was 6) but once you need to do more advanced stuff it requires a lot of tricks and workarounds which needs to be memorized and are hard to find just by reasoning or are straight impossible without the use of macros which introduces many compatibility issues.

Pandas on the other hand is harder to approach but once you learn the concepts between its basic data structures you can do a lot with little "Google-Fu".

what's a beautiful thing ! Mixing SQLite3 and Matplotlib in Python !

Python User-
C:\WINDOWS\system32>pip install scikit-image
CMD/Bash-
Collecting scikit-image
Downloading scikit-image(12.6MB)
██████████████████████████████
Collecting numpy
Downloading numpy(1.3MB)
██████████████████████████████
Collecting matplotlib
Downloading matplotlib(1.3KB)
██████████████████████████████
Collecting decorator
Downloading decorator(6.8MB)
██████████████████████████████
Collecting imageio
Downloading imageio(3.6MB)
██████████████████████████████
Collecting cycler
Downloading cycler(2.9MB)
██████████████████████████████

Installing collected packages cycler, imageio, decorator, matplotlib, numpy, scikit-image
Successfully installed cycler, imageio, decorator, matplotlib, numpy
Failed to load DLL of scikit-image.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>

I am using python and matplotlib as a substitute for microsoftword plotting .. could i count myself as a programmer ? Lol