By asking for the 'relative popularity' of different languages, rather than asking 'what is the best language?' or 'what is your favorite language', I hope to make this somewhat objective.
I want a language for machine learning / matrices, that is:
I've currently settled on java, since it's average at everything, but really poor at nothing, but I can't help feeling that java feels more and more dated, eg no operator overloading, and the borked generics, so I'm wondering what the feeling on the relative popularity of different languages for machine learning is?
I think mostly people use C++, matlab and python, but just curious if there's some language that I've missed that everyone's busy using, that I didn't realize yet?
When I worked on a machine learning project with a friend, I picked up R, which is open source, designed for matrix math, and has extensive library support. It's certainly terser than Java, and I found the syntax pleasant, but that's a subjective judgement.
According to Rexer Analytics, R is the most popular data mining tool, being used by almost half of all of their survey respondents.
(Information on R is hard to search for, so they have a Google frontend for searching for information about it.)