Comment by thijsn
3 hours ago
Polars is indeed more verbose when coming from pandas, but in my experience it is an advantage for when you're reading that same code after not having touched it for months.
pandas is write-optimized, so you can quickly and powerfully transform your data. Once you're used to it, it allows you to quickly get your work done. But figuring out what is happening in that code after returning to it a while later is a lot harder compared to Polars, which is more read-optimized. This read-optimized API coincidentally allows the engine to perform more optimizations because all implicit knowledge about data must be typed out instead of kept in your head.
I don't agree that more verbose code is necessarily more readable when the shorter code looks like familiar math. All you have to do is learn how operators broadcast across array-like structures, how slicing and filtering works. Perhaps with more complicated examples the shorter code becomes harder to read after months away? Mathematicians are able to handle a lot of compact equations.
No doubt some of this comes down to preference as to what's considered readable. I never really bought that argument that regular expressions create more problems than they're worth. Perhaps I side on the expressivity end of the readability debate.