Hi Bikram!

Thanks for writing! Sorry for the delayed response.

The program has three terms. Roughly speaking, the first term will use Python and the last two will use C++.

Autonomous vehicle engineers on the job tend to use a variety of languages, depending on their team, their facility with different languages, the APIs their tools expose, and performance requirements.

C++ is a compiled, high-performance language, so most code that actually runs on the vehicle tends to be C++.

That said, many engineers spend most of their time prototyping algorithms in Python, Matlab, or even Java or other languages. Other engineers spend pretty much all of their time writing production code in C / C++.

Machine learning engineers often spend a lot of time in Python, because libraries like TensorFlow rely on Python for their primary APIs. TensorFlow does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of compiling networks for faster performance.

Getting back to our program, the opening term focuses on deep learning and computer vision (which itself has a strong deep learning component), so we’ll use Python there. As we move into areas like sensor fusion, localization, and control, we’ll focus more on C / C++.

We appreciate that a lot of engineers taking the program may not be as experienced in C++ as in Python, so we’ll ease into C++ slowly and try to help make that a smooth ramp.

David