title: Large scale machine learning - Python or Java?
body: <p>I am currently embarking on a project that will involve crawling and processing huge amounts of data (hundreds of gigs), and also mining them for extracting structured data, named entity recognition, deduplication, classification etc. </p>
  
  <p>I'm familiar with ML tools from both Java and the Python world: Lingpipe, Mahout, NLTK, etc. However, when it comes down to picking a platform for such a large scale problem - I lack sufficient experience to decide between Java or Python.</p>
  
  <p>I know this sounds like a vague question, and but I am looking for general advice on picking either Java or Python. The JVM offers better performance(?) over Python, but are libraries like Lingpipe etc. match up with the Python ecosystem? If I went this Python, how easy would it be scaling it and managing it across multiple machines etc.</p>
  
  <p>Which one should I go with and why?</p>