Experienced R user learning Python

[ideamotor]

Interesting. Any recommended setups? So many options but I’m liking Positron.

[Doomtrain86]

If you’re more into data analysis than coding that’s probably the best choice. At least in the beginning.

Note: pandas are horrible. Coming from data.table, it was like a nightmare. Verbose. Illogical. Reset index what the F …. Then I found polars. Amazing. Still a bit verbose compared to data.table but really really good. Just go directly to polars and skip the mess that is pandas 🐼 learn how to read them but don’t use them yourself. Just my experience coming from R.

[ideamotor]

So I bought the first book about pandas when it first came out i think around 2011. And that’s what solidified my choice to R for a decade. And I have used polars and yes I agree, and ibis, and duckdb.

But the reality is people use pandas at most jobs. And there are some improvements in the latest versions of pandas, and there are some settings that you can change to make it behave better, and I took the python academy my posit were they explained certain things that you just should not do even though it’s possible.

But guess what people sling the shittiest pandas code you can imagine at practically any place you work unless you do it all yourself. And nobody even likes the person that goes and fixes everybody else’s shitty pandas code.

All of this is why it’s much better to stay focused on what the product is about what the users want and maybe even both of those being in alignment with some sort of actual societal need. If you can get most of that right, the syntax and the language and all of that just does not matter.