What makes it the best language for AI and ML? I've never heard that take so just curious your thoughts. It's nice that legacy code still runs but that's usually not people's concern in ML.
I (and my colleagues) have worked on statistical, data analysis, and ML in Java since before data science was even a career field, and before Python became popular. In my opinion Java has better IDE support, more stable and proven libraries, and high performance.
Java does occasionally require that a person might have to implement their own code after reading a research paper, but I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
I've never understood Python's popularity except that I've heard some people say that it's used at Google.
