With respect, its laughable to think that anyone working on big-data with R has _not_ heard of `data.table`. When your livelihood depends on it, you tend to fin

With respect, its laughable to think that anyone working on big-data with R has _not_ heard of `data.table`. When your livelihood depends on it, you tend to find it out one way or the other. However, I'd claim most folks don't deal with big data or even medium data! [Aside: I chuckled at the 1e5 columns on the plot]. Personally, at the small-to-medium range, all languages are fast enough. It boils down to ergonomics for me. I _detest_ the subscript notation. It slows me down -- not just productivity-wise but also how I read or reason-about my code. Not surprisingly, I prefer `dplyr` over `data.table` (base R or `pandas`)