Comment by rich_sasha
4 days ago
I've been living in the shadow of pandas for about a decade now, and the only thing I learned is to avoid using it.
I 100% agree that pandas addresses all the pain points of data analysis in the wild, and this is precisely why it is so popular. My point is, it doesn't address them well. It seems like a conglomerate of special cases, written for a specific problem it's author was facing, with little concern for consistency, generality or other use cases that might arise.
In my usage, any time saved by its (very useful) methods tends to be lost on fixing subtle bugs introduced by strange pandas behaviours.
In my use cases, I reindex the data using pandas and get it to numpy arrays as soon as I can, and work with those, with a small library of utilities I wrote over the years. I'd gladly use a "sane pandas" instead.
Aye, but we've learned it, we've got code bases written in it, many of us are much more data kids than "real devs".
I get it doesn't follow best practices, but it does do what it needs to. Speed has been an issue, and it's exciting seeing that problem being solved.
Interesting to see so many people recently saying "polars looks great, but no way I'll rewrite". This library seems to give a lot of people, myself included, exactly what we want. I look forward to trying it.