[pjungwir]

One place where I am often tempted to break the Southwest model is using Rails for an app server and Python for machine learning. I really believe Rails is a better choice for quickly building and adapting web applications, but Python beats Ruby hands down for ML work, both exploratory and in production. If I knew I was building an ML-heavy application right from the start I'd probably use Python for everything, but more often I find places where an existing Rails project could benefit by adding an ML component. Webdev and ML are easy to segregate, architecturally and personnel-wise, so I don't think the impact of using both is too bad, but I'm curious what others think about this. Does anyone else use both languages together? If so, what is the size of your staff?