[sdflkjsdlkj]

>Hotter take: ML would have advanced faster if another front-end language had been available and widely adopted instead of Python. One that is interactive yet fast & compilable, multithreaded (no GIL), isn't bloated, doesn't care about white spaces,...

It would have to have been statically typed to get any real benefit. The programming world would be so much better if OCaml was the dominant programming language. With 5.0 it checks off every single box for an amazing programming language:

1. Garbage collected

2. Null safe

3. Algebraic data types

4. Multi threaded

5. Pattern matching

6. Support for object oriented programming

[marcinzm]

The problem with statically typed imho is that you often need to pre-define all your input data types ahead of time which is a massive pain and matrix operations don't work with the type system.

As a result your language is only type safe outside of the data and NN graph components which makes it fairly useless when 99% of the work is on the data and NN components.

edit: I've done a fair amount of ML, Data and Scala including ML/Data in Scala. So I've tried it and the type system wasn't of much help to be honest.

[pharmakom]

It lacks ecosystem though. If OCaml worked on an existing big platform like JVM that would be a killer feature for me.

[ghostwriter]

Scala works on JVM and it has everything from the list above.

[pharmakom]

Scala doesn't feel "ML" enough imo

[nequo]

Is F# closer to what you are looking for?