JSON vs. JavaScript vs. Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit vs. Visual Basic Comparison Chart

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. JSON is built on two structures: 1. A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array. 2. An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence. These are universal data structures. Virtually all modern programming languages support them in one form or another.

The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is an open-source toolkit for commercial-grade distributed deep learning. It describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. CNTK allows the user to easily realize and combine popular model types such as feed-forward DNNs, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs/LSTMs). CNTK implements stochastic gradient descent (SGD, error backpropagation) learning with automatic differentiation and parallelization across multiple GPUs and servers. CNTK can be included as a library in your Python, C#, or C++ programs, or used as a standalone machine-learning tool through its own model description language (BrainScript). In addition you can use the CNTK model evaluation functionality from your Java programs. CNTK supports 64-bit Linux or 64-bit Windows operating systems. To install you can either choose pre-compiled binary packages, or compile the toolkit from the source provided in GitHub.