Other coding languages...

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Hi all,

(Hope this is not to off-topic)

What are great programming languages to know in order to get up-to-speeds with spaCy/Prodigy/Thinc?

Knowing python (with all relevant sw suites) is obvious, pytorch desirable, but as a “data hacker” (not a clean coder) I have not a good feeling for the other languages. C+ (for cython), java/ javascript (for making good customer UX), etc. Same for big data frameworks

I don’t intend to start a big “war-of-the-languages”, more input from you of the what and why

thanks,

Andreas

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spaCy and Thinc are written entirely in Python and Cython. Prodigy’s server and recipes are in Python and Cython, and the front-end is in HTML/CSS/Javascript. So, those should definitely be plenty :).

I wrote up some thoughts about Cython here: https://explosion.ai/blog/writing-c-in-cython . You might also find my talk from PyCon Israel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJR3qCUB27I

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Hi Matthew,

thanks for the input. Gives me a feel for what to write in the “requirement” section of the job ad.

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This is an interesting question! :smiley: In general, I think it's definitely good to focus on Python and the language features itself, rather than some specific framework or API. This is also part of our philosophy: in our libraries, we try to not steal the control flow and let the user write regular Python code. For instance, instead of just providing you a fit() or a train() method with a bunch of arguments, you can write your own training loop. Instead of a method doc.get_all_verbs, we encourage you to write [token for token in doc if token.pos_ == "VERB"].

Prodigy implements a similar philosophy: Instead of writing recipes in a Prodigy-specific config language, you can write pretty straightforward Python functions. And instead of making the user implement a specific "Prodigy stream" object, you can pass in a regular Python generator that can do whatever you like, as long as it yields dictionaries.

Front-end technologies like HTML/CSS or JavaScript aren't strictly required to use our stack – you can totally be productive in spaCy and Prodigy without them. But it's definitely a nice-to-have, especially when it comes to delivering end-to-end projects, even if it's just for showcasing a trained model, or building a demo or proof of concept.