Travis Oliphant: NumPy, SciPy, Anaconda, Python & Scientific Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #224
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a firsthand history of how Python became the language of scientific computing and ML.
What it is
Lex Fridman interviews Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda, about scientific Python and its history. It runs about three hours.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec chubot · 2024-04 · on “Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon”
Yup, I agree that Python composes like Unix does, which is a reason for its phenomenal growth: Narrow Waists Can Be Interior or Exterior: PyObject vs. Unix Files - [LINK] The appendix links to: Why is Python the language of machine learning? [LINK] In particular, I highly recommend this bit of history from NumPy creator Travis Oliphant: [this video]
Recommends chubot · 2021-11 · on “Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?”
Because Python has NumPy, which implements vectorized math on arrays and matrices. Machine learning algorithms are implemented naturally and efficiently with those primitives. PyTorch, TensorFlow, and I think every other machine learning framework in Python all use NumPy. JavaScript, Ruby, and Perl either don't have this abstraction at all, or they have much weaker versions of it, and many fewer scientific libraries. NumPy started in the early 2000's and continues to this day. It takes decades to build up this infrastructure! This recent interview with NumPy creator Travis Oliphant is great: [this video] He talks about how there were competing abstractions like "Numeric" and another library, and
Recommends calmdown13 · 2022-03 · on “The counterintuitive rise of Python in scientific computing (2020)”
This episode of the lex fridman podcast gives a good overview of how python's scientific computing community developed. [this video]
Cites windsignaling · 2022-12 · on “NumPy 1.24 Release Notes”
If in doubt, you can always check out the Lex Fridman podcast with Numpy creator Travis Oliphant: [this video] They pronounce the "Py" as "pie".