Comment by berkes
4 days ago
It does to me. Well, a 1x developer into a .01x dev in my case.
My conclusion was that pandas is not for developers. But for one-offs by managers, data-scientists, scientists, and so on. And maybe for "hackers" who cludge together stuff 'till it works and then hopefully never touch it.
Which made me realize such thoughts can come over as smug, patronizing or belittling. But they do show how software can be optimized for different use-cases.
The danger then lies into not recognizing these use-cases when you pull in smth like pandas. "Maybe using panda's to map and reduce the CSVs that our users upload to insert batches isn't a good idea at all".
This is often worsened by the tools/platforms/lib devs or communities not advertising these sweet spots and limitations. Not in the case of Pandas though: that's really clear about this not being a lib or framework for devs, but a tool(kit) to do data analysis with. Kudo's for that.
I'm one of those people myself, and have whittled my Pandas use down to displaying pretty tables in Jupyter. Everything else I do in straight Numpy.
Imo numpy is not better than pandas for the things you'd use pandas for, though polars is far superior.
>My conclusion was that pandas is not for developers. But for one-offs by managers, data-scientists, scientists, and so on. And maybe for "hackers" who cludge together stuff 'till it works and then hopefully never touch it.
It doesn't work for me so it can't work for anyone?
No. "It doesn't work for me. Why is that?" "well, turns out Panda's has a clear and well-defined use-case. So using it outside that use-case will bring problems, pain, friction, etc. Using it for something its not intended for, is why it doesn't work for me"