I haven’t researched this extensively but have used the Python data science toolkit for a while now and so can comment on its advantages.
To start, I think it’s important to reframe the question a bit. At least in my neck of the woods, very few people just do deep learning with Python. Instead, a lot of people use Python to do Machine Learning, Data Science, Stats (although hardcore stats seems to have a historical bias towards R). This leads to two big benefits of using Python: pretty good support for vectorized operations and numerical computing (via calling into lower level languages of course and also Cython) and a toolkit for “full stack” data science and machine learning.
Regarding the numerical computing side of things, I’m not super up-to-date on the JS numerical computing ecosystem but when I last checked, JS had neither good pre-existing libraries that compared to numpy nor as good a setup for integrating with the lower level numerical computing ecosystem (but I also didn’t look hard for it in fairness).
Regarding the full stack ML / DS point, in practice, modeling is a small part of the overall ML / DS workflow, especially once you go outside the realm of benchmark datasets or introduce matters of scale. The former involves handling data processing and analysis (transformation, plotting, aggregation) in addition to building models. Python (and R for what it’s worth) has a suite of battle-hardened libraries and tools for both data processing—things in the vein of airflow, luigi, etc. -- and analysis—pandas, scipy, seaborn, matplotlib, etc. -- that, as far as I know Javascript lacks.
ETA: To be clear, Python has lots of downsides and doesn’t solve any of these problems perfectly, but the question focused on relative to JS so I tried to answer in the same vein.
I haven’t researched this extensively but have used the Python data science toolkit for a while now and so can comment on its advantages.
To start, I think it’s important to reframe the question a bit. At least in my neck of the woods, very few people just do deep learning with Python. Instead, a lot of people use Python to do Machine Learning, Data Science, Stats (although hardcore stats seems to have a historical bias towards R). This leads to two big benefits of using Python: pretty good support for vectorized operations and numerical computing (via calling into lower level languages of course and also Cython) and a toolkit for “full stack” data science and machine learning.
Regarding the numerical computing side of things, I’m not super up-to-date on the JS numerical computing ecosystem but when I last checked, JS had neither good pre-existing libraries that compared to numpy nor as good a setup for integrating with the lower level numerical computing ecosystem (but I also didn’t look hard for it in fairness).
Regarding the full stack ML / DS point, in practice, modeling is a small part of the overall ML / DS workflow, especially once you go outside the realm of benchmark datasets or introduce matters of scale. The former involves handling data processing and analysis (transformation, plotting, aggregation) in addition to building models. Python (and R for what it’s worth) has a suite of battle-hardened libraries and tools for both data processing—things in the vein of airflow, luigi, etc. -- and analysis—pandas, scipy, seaborn, matplotlib, etc. -- that, as far as I know Javascript lacks.
ETA: To be clear, Python has lots of downsides and doesn’t solve any of these problems perfectly, but the question focused on relative to JS so I tried to answer in the same vein.