[claytonjy]

It's really hard to do much ML in anything _except_ python. Virtually everyone improving the ML ecosystems of other language got their start in Python and are knowingly competing with Python (e.g. R, Julia). If you want to get started in ML today, python is the obvious easiest path forward.

So, most ML users are python users. I don't know how that group compares to non-ML python users, but I have a feeling there isn't a flood of eager new Django devs the way there is Pytorch users. Most non-ML things you could do with python can be done similarly well in Go/Rust/Typescript, but there's no other option for most ML stuff.

[mjw1007]

I found a recentish (2021) survey at [1] which suggests that in 2021 ML was some way behind web development, sysadmin stuff, and data analysis among Python users (and didn't seem to be on the way up the list).

[1] https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2021/#Gene...

[aragilar]

The obvious next question being, what's the difference between ML and data analysis from the perspective of the survey participants (is ML a strict subset)? Given the values don't add up to 100%, there's likely lots of overlap and so you could easily have web developers choosing Python for the ML ecosystem.

[claytonjy]

Great source; looks like I've quite underestimated the python-web-dev crowd's size.

I'm curious what the longer-term trends look like; not much change between consecutive years.

Data analysis is basically a pre-requisite for ML, so the combined "data stuff" usage is quite a lot bigger than web dev usage!