Wes McKinney (author of Pandas, but also co-author of a host of other major data formats/tools like Ibis, Arrow, Parquet, Feather), wrote "10 Things I Hate Abou

Wes McKinney (author of Pandas, but also co-author of a host of other major data formats/tools like Ibis, Arrow, Parquet, Feather), wrote "10 Things I Hate About pandas" https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/ https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/ It was one of his earlier projects, and it "stuck". It was one of the first popular dataframe libraries for Python and it filled that niche for years (alongside dplyr/data.table in R), especially during the big data/data science craze of the 2010s. Tons have been written on it, data scientists and other data folk were brought up on it, so it's the de facto standard in many pipelines. Since then, we have moved on to better tools like Polars and DuckDB. You will still see a lot of Pandas code in the wild due to how prevalent it is, but if you were to start a new project, you might want to use more modern tools. Pandas is kinda of analogous to jquery -- jquery was hugely influential during its time, but we have learned a lot since, and there are more modern options (React/Vue/Svelte).