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Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

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Re: Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

#22

Post by holub008 »

wsowens wrote: post #14

Despite writing most of my procedural code in Python, I've always preferred doing my data analysis in R. For all of R's warts, the ergonomics of the dplyr + ggplot + the rest of the tidyverse are very tough to beat. My few attempts to use Pandas and matplotlib/seaborne have always proved frustrating. Based on this cheatsheet though, it seems like Polars addresses some of the friction of Pandas. Looking forward to try…

Agreed, as an R and polars user. The fundamental advantage R holds over other languages/libraries is expressions. The ability to reference columns directly AND interoperate with vectorized base ops in R is unfair. Of course, this super power is equally confusing to learners, fraught for production code, etc.

Re: Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

#25

Post by thijsn »

paulfharrison wrote: post #23

I'm sure Polars is great, but I can't get over needing 10 characters of ceremony every time I want to refer to a column in a data frame. pl.col("...")

I've seen people with exactly that frustration use "import polars.col as c" and use c("colname") instead!

Re: Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

#27

Post by cheesecakegood »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #13
clircle wrote: post #3

I get that the data science world has moved on to python, but I always felt that R's data.table had the slickest dataframe developer experience. I have toyed with Polars for a few hours, maybe I should give it a better chance.

I first learned about R at a python user group meeting. It was when Pandas was new, and we were having a bunch of talks about it. Wes McKinney even came to give one before going to Pycon. Anyway, the general consensus at the time was that R was much nicer once you had your data, and if all you had to do was transform it. But that everything else was better in Python. One of our group members did an experimental proje…

The library ‘ryp’[1] now exists that does the same, the data lives in an arrow format so you can write R inside Python without re-writing to disk

[1] https://github.com/briscverse/ryp

Re: Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

#29

Post by lowmagnet »

latent-person wrote: post #20
mihaelm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bare R experience is not that great, to put it mildly, but it's a whole other story if you add tidyverse on top of it. The data work becomes really easy then, but I still prefer Python because of familiarity and a better experience & ecosystem when you want to do anything beyond data wrangling & analysis. I found `polars` to be a better experience than `pandas` even though I'd say it leaks some "Rustisms" in its…

> The bare R experience is not that great Why do you say that? Base R is arguably nicer to work with data than pandas is for example. Happy to provide specific examples to prove my point if you want.

my main frustration with pandas was certain idioms did not work efficiently because they escaped the pandas kernel, causing memory copy and other bad behavior.
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