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by tastroder 2408 days ago
> But without that understanding, giving those people a UI of functions they have no understanding of is just a recipe for disaster.

I can see use of the UI in a classroom setting to bridge the learning gap for people that are pretty proficient with the utility libraries like pandas offer, but lack the experience with Python and reading documentation at this point in time. I honestly fail to understand this critique, that sounds like saying we should ban Excel because people could use it to calculate something that doesn't make sense. It's not like pandas does something magical and every half decent Excel user understands the functionality behind the buttons I see in the bamboo demo linked here.

> The market for analysts who aren't also software engineers is shrinking to 0.

While I certainly get where this perspective might be coming from, I find it unlikely to be true. The recent acquisition of Tableau and growth of similar no-code tools shows that it's untrue from a business perspective (just read one of the HN threads on these topics, plenty of non-SE people making good use of them). Even from the code perspective, outside of production most of the data analysis code I see hardly shows any signs of good software engineering practice and yet fulfills the task it is written for.