[Jabbermonkey]

I hit a roadblock with trying to read Stata files into Pandas a few months ago. I discovered that not all versions of Stata file formats are supported by Pandas in Python. R has much better support for Stata files.

With the help of Feather, which was written over Arrow, I was able to read Stata files into R, write the dataframe out to Feather and read the Feather file into a Pandas dataframe with no manipulation.

Without Feather I would have had to resort to using CSVs as intermediate files which would have meant additional pre-processing in R and post-processing in Pandas. Feather and Arrow saved me a bunch of time on this.

I'm looking forward to using Arrow more broadly but, even with just Feather, Wes and Hadley have vastly simplified the effort of interfacing between R and Python/Pandas. I'm also very excited to see what else comes out of their partnership at Ursa Labs: https://ursalabs.org