Python skills ‘increasingly essential’ to dev teams venturing into advanced AI

Python’s status as the primary language for AI and machine learning projects, from its extensive data-handling capabilities to its flexibility and portability, is well-founded. Just how well-founded can be seen in new user data from Snowflake. The cloud data provider reported that, year on year, use of Python grew 571% in Snowpark, Snowflake’s set of libraries which securely deploy and process non-SQL code. In other words, it will not be a surprise to see Python, Scala and Java at the top of this list, but the numbers are what makes it interesting: Scala saw a 387% increase, compared with Java at 131%. Alongside this, the report noted that usage of the most popular AI/ML open source Python libraries in Snowpark has increased by 335%. Scikit-learn saw a 474% uptick, while XGBoost, focused on gradient boosting, saw an increase of 357%. From Snowflake’s perspective, the company was keen to note that the increase went beyond shifting existing work to its platform, but a net increa