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I am not sure how useful this 5 year old article is. I stopped following the SciRuby project a long time ago The DaRu (Ruby DataFrame) sub-project's last commi

I am not sure how useful this 5 year old article is. I stopped following the SciRuby project a long time ago The DaRu (Ruby DataFrame) sub-project's last commit it around a year ago, but the daru-view sub-project (visualization and plotting for web apps) seems to be maintained and updated frequently: https://github.com/SciRuby/daru https://github.com/SciRuby/daru https://github.com/SciRuby/daru-view https://github.com/SciRuby/daru-view While I like Ruby's syntax and community, it is really hard to compete with in high-level scientific programming market when you are competing against Python, R & Julia (and Mathematica and MatLab).

zverok 5y ago
(author here) Me neither! Don't know how or why it suddenly appeared on the HN main :) Just to provide a bit of the personal context: this article caused creator of DaRu (Sameer Deshmukh) to contact me and propose to work on DaRu together, and so I did (see @zverok here: https://github.com/SciRuby/daru/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SciRuby/daru/graphs/contributors). I also was, for some time, SciRuby/DaRu's mentor for Google Summer of Code (and, IIRC, it was my initial idea that daru-view grew from). Also, since that article, an independent dataframe library https://github.com/ankane/rover https://github.com/ankane/rover was created by Andrew Kane, handling some of API and implementation in a cleaner way. That being said, I am not sure that DaRu, or Rover (or "dataframe" idea in general) has enough visibility in the Ruby community. It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing", while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. That's what I'd focus this article on if I'd written it today.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  Thank you for the update. > I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. I agree. It is one of those data structures that developers tend to use by reimplementing badly using arrays/lists and dictionarys, usually even unaware that they are doing so.
- mamcx 5y ago
  > , while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. And I add that just the datatype is not enough, because is "this close" to be the foundation for relational programming (p.d: I'm building a relational language where you can say everything is alike data-frames/relations: https://tablam.org https://tablam.org). > It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing" This is part of the problem, truly. Being so focused on "science" when I think is better to frame it as data manipulation like you do in SQL tables/views, making it much more general than is used for...

zverok 5y ago

(author here) Me neither! Don't know how or why it suddenly appeared on the HN main :) Just to provide a bit of the personal context: this article caused creator of DaRu (Sameer Deshmukh) to contact me and propose to work on DaRu together, and so I did (see @zverok here: https://github.com/SciRuby/daru/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SciRuby/daru/graphs/contributors). I also was, for some time, SciRuby/DaRu's mentor for Google Summer of Code (and, IIRC, it was my initial idea that daru-view grew from). Also, since that article, an independent dataframe library https://github.com/ankane/rover https://github.com/ankane/rover was created by Andrew Kane, handling some of API and implementation in a cleaner way. That being said, I am not sure that DaRu, or Rover (or "dataframe" idea in general) has enough visibility in the Ruby community. It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing", while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. That's what I'd focus this article on if I'd written it today.

teruakohatu 5y ago
Thank you for the update. > I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. I agree. It is one of those data structures that developers tend to use by reimplementing badly using arrays/lists and dictionarys, usually even unaware that they are doing so.
mamcx 5y ago
> , while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes. And I add that just the datatype is not enough, because is "this close" to be the foundation for relational programming (p.d: I'm building a relational language where you can say everything is alike data-frames/relations: https://tablam.org https://tablam.org). > It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing" This is part of the problem, truly. Being so focused on "science" when I think is better to frame it as data manipulation like you do in SQL tables/views, making it much more general than is used for...