if I could tell myself in 2015 who had just found the feather library and was using it to power my unhinged topic modeling for power point slides work, and explained what feather would become (arrow) and the impact it would have on the date ecosystem. I would have looked at 2026 me like he was a crazy person.

Yet today I feel it was 2016 dataders who is the crazy one lol

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ayhanfuat 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed. feather was a library to exchange data between R and pandas dataframes. People tend to bash pandas but its creator (Wes McKinney) has changed the data ecosystem for the better with the learnings coming from pandas.

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jtbaker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know pandas has a lot of technical warts and shortcomings, but I'm grateful for how much it empowered me early in my data/software career, and the API still feels more ergonomic to me due to the years of usage - plus GeoPandas layering on top of it.

Really, prefer DuckDB SQL these days for anything that needs to perform well, and feel like SQL is easier to grok than python code most of the time.

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0xcafefood 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do people bash pandas? If so, it reminds me of Bjarne's quip that the two types of programming languages are the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

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postexitus 7 hours ago | parent [-]

polars people do - although I wouldn't call polars something that nobody uses.

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ayhanfuat 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I also use polars in new projects. I think Wes McKinney also uses it. If I remember correctly I saw him commenting on some polars memory related issues on GitHub. But a good chunk of polars' success can be attributed to Arrow which McKinney co-created. All the gripes people have with pandas, he had them too and built something powerful to overcome those.

	▲	mistrial9 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I saw Wes speak in the early days of Pandas, in Berkeley. He solved problems that others just worked around for decades. His solutions are quirky but the work was very solid. His career advanced a lot IMHO for substantial reasons.. Wes personally marched through swamps and reached the other side.. others complain and do what they always have done.. I personally agree with the criticisms of the syntax, but Pandas is real and it was not easy to build it.