Which language is the best for genetic programming?

Which is(are) the best programming language(s) for a Machine Learning researcher? Why?

• There are many occasions when a ML researcher would process data (in the form of text files, numbers (arrays, matrices), images, plots, sometimes collect data/crawl from the web), implement algorithms, replicate experiments of other researchers etc. So, supposedly the language should handle text and numerical data pretty well, offer easy/ quick web programming stuff besides many other advantages. More importantly, the language should save programmers' time (offer a decent trade-off between programmer time and cpu time!) . Thinking of all these factors, I guess, "Python" is a good choice. Is there any better language with more merits?

• Answer:

  Python and R are good for initial prototyping and you can check your results very fast. But in the long run it runs slower than compiled languages like Java. Some good Java tools: Apache Mahout:- http://mahout.apache.org/ Weka:-  http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/ Malet:- http://mallet.cs.umass.edu