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Pandas 3.0

pandas.pydata.org

21–30 of 125 posts

Re: Pandas 3.0

#21

I've migrated off of pandas to polars for my workflows to reap the benefit of, in my experience a 10-20x speedup on average. I can't imagine anything bringing me back short of a performance miracle. LLMs have made syntax almost a non-barrier.

Polars being so fast, and embeddable into other languages, has made it a no brainer for me to adopt it.

I have integrated Explorer https://github.com/elixir-explorer/explorer, which leverages it, into many Elixir apps, so happy to have this.

Re: Pandas 3.0

#22
post #20

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types th…

Sounds too much like an advertisement. Also we need to watch out when diving into Polars . Polars is VC backed Opensource project with cloud offering , which may become an opencore project - we know how those goes.

> we know how those go

They get forked and stay open source? At least this is what happens to all the popular ones. You can't really un-open-source a project if users want to keep it open-source.

Re: Pandas 3.0

#23

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types th…

I almost fully agree. I would add that Pandas API is poorly thought through and full of footguns.

Where I certainly disagree is the "frame as a dict of time series" setting, and general time series analysis.

The feel is also different. Pandas is an interactive data analysis container, poorly suited for production use. Polars I feel is the other way round.

Re: Pandas 3.0

#24
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds too much like an advertisement. Also we need to watch out when diving into Polars . Polars is VC backed Opensource project with cloud offering , which may become an opencore project - we know how those goes.

> we know how those go They get forked and stay open source? At least this is what happens to all the popular ones. You can't really un-open-source a project if users want to keep it open-source.

Depends on your definition of popular; plenty of examples where the business interests don't align well with open source.

Re: Pandas 3.0

#25

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types th…

I almost fully agree. I would add that Pandas API is poorly thought through and full of footguns. Where I certainly disagree is the "frame as a dict of time series" setting, and general time series analysis. The feel is also different. Pandas is an interactive data analysis container, poorly suited for production use. Polars I feel is the other way round.

I think that's a sane take. Indeed, I think most data analysts find it much easier to use pandas over polars when playing with data (mainly the bracket syntax is faster and mostly sensible)

Re: Pandas 3.0

#27

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types th…

I almost fully agree. I would add that Pandas API is poorly thought through and full of footguns. Where I certainly disagree is the "frame as a dict of time series" setting, and general time series analysis. The feel is also different. Pandas is an interactive data analysis container, poorly suited for production use. Polars I feel is the other way round.

I think that's a fair opinion, but I'd argue against it being poorly thought out - pandas HAS to stick with older api decisions (dating back to before data science was a mature enough field, and it has pandas to thank for much of it) for backwards compatibility.

Re: Pandas 3.0

#28

I've migrated off of pandas to polars for my workflows to reap the benefit of, in my experience a 10-20x speedup on average. I can't imagine anything bringing me back short of a performance miracle. LLMs have made syntax almost a non-barrier.

" 10-20x speedup on average. "

Is this everyone's experience?

Re: Pandas 3.0

#29
post #19

I've migrated off of pandas to polars for my workflows to reap the benefit of, in my experience a 10-20x speedup on average. I can't imagine anything bringing me back short of a performance miracle. LLMs have made syntax almost a non-barrier.

Went from pandas to polars to duckdb. As mentioned elsewhere SQL is the most readable for me and LLM does most of the coding on my end (quant). So I need it at the most readable and rudimentary/step-wise level. OT, but I can’t imagine data science being a job category for too long. It’s got to be one of the first to go in AI age especially since the market is so saturated with mediocre talents.

This is interesting. I wanted to dig into it a little since I am not sure I am following the logic of that statement.

Do you mean that AI would take over the field, because by default most people there are already not producing anything that a simple 'talk to data' LLM won't deliver?

Re: Pandas 3.0

#30
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I don't even use LLM normally as I found polars' syntax to be very intuitive. I just searched my ChatGPT history and the only times I used it are when I'm dealing with list and struct columns that were not in pandas.

iirc part of pandas’ popularity was that it modeled some of R’s ergonomics. What a time in history, when such things mattered! (To be clear, I’m not making fun of pandas. It was the bridge I crossed that moved me from living in Excel to living in code.)

I learned about pandas with R in my class way back when. At the time, it seemed like magic. In a sense, it still does, but things evolve.
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