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pandas keeps turning me off, even if I feel like I ought to like it; I feel like I never really know what is going on, and the syntax feels like a domain-specif

pandas keeps turning me off, even if I feel like I ought to like it; I feel like I never really know what is going on, and the syntax feels like a domain-specific-language tacked on top of python, and it just doesn't sit well (my opinion!). Besides... some of the functions have an insane number of parameters, e.g. pandas.read_table(filepath_or_buffer: Union[str, pathlib.Path, IO[~AnyStr]], sep='t', delimiter=None, header='infer', names=None, index_col=None, usecols=None, squeeze=False, prefix=None, mangle_dupe_cols=True, dtype=None, engine=None, converters=None, true_values=None, false_values=None, skipinitialspace=False, skiprows=None, skipfooter=0, nrows=None, na_values=None, keep_default_na=True, na_filter=True, verbose=False, skip_blank_lines=True, parse_dates=False, infer_datetime_format=False, keep_date_col=False, date_parser=None, dayfirst=False, cache_dates=True, iterator=False, chunksize=None, compression='infer', thousands=None, decimal=b'.', lineterminator=None, quotechar='"', quoting=0, doublequote=True, escapechar=None, comment=None, encoding=None, dialect=None, error_bad_lines=True, warn_bad_lines=True, delim_whitespace=False, low_memory=True, memory_map=False, float_precision=None) I use R happily enough, and MATLAB too for that matter. Maybe, some-day, I'll see the pandas-light.

prepend 7y ago
Why do you not like so many parameters? They are optional so typically pandas only has one or two required parameters.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  Callables requiring many parameters is often indicative that the code is doing too much, perhaps as coder after coder tweaked it to handle their particular use-case. I am not a big fan of (the over-use of) optional arguments either: I prefer code I'm reading to be more explicit, which is more pythonic imo.
  - cometsong 7y ago
    I agree on over-use of optionals. I disagree with the code is thus doing too much, however. At least in this specific and some other cases, the method shown there is a wrapper to do a major task of converting data formats from one form to another. These optional, well-documented arguments show the defaults used, and are modifiable in, as you said, specific use-cases.
msquog 7y ago
Learning pandas really does feel like learning a new language - new syntax, idioms and implementation details to be aware of. Much more so than other libraries imo. Given how utterly powerful it is, I think that's OK. Not sure a large list of optional params (with good documentation) is a bad thing though.

prepend 7y ago

Why do you not like so many parameters? They are optional so typically pandas only has one or two required parameters.

jonnycomputer 7y ago
Callables requiring many parameters is often indicative that the code is doing too much, perhaps as coder after coder tweaked it to handle their particular use-case. I am not a big fan of (the over-use of) optional arguments either: I prefer code I'm reading to be more explicit, which is more pythonic imo.
- cometsong 7y ago
  I agree on over-use of optionals. I disagree with the code is thus doing too much, however. At least in this specific and some other cases, the method shown there is a wrapper to do a major task of converting data formats from one form to another. These optional, well-documented arguments show the defaults used, and are modifiable in, as you said, specific use-cases.

msquog 7y ago

Learning pandas really does feel like learning a new language - new syntax, idioms and implementation details to be aware of. Much more so than other libraries imo. Given how utterly powerful it is, I think that's OK. Not sure a large list of optional params (with good documentation) is a bad thing though.