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by selcuka 898 days ago
> I guess you have to stop and admit you're just not the target user of this tech product.

On the other hand, how can you become a target user if you don't know that a product category exists?

2 comments

This project is a solution to a particular kind of problem. The way you become a target user of that solution is by first having the problem it's a solution to.

If you have the problem "I want to analyze a bunch of tabular data", you'll start researching and asking around about it, and you'll quickly discover a few things: 1. people do this with (usually columnar / "OLAP") sql query interfaces, 2. people usually end up augmenting that with some in memory analyses in a general purpose programming environment, 3. people often choose R or python for this, 4. both of those languages lean heavily on a concept they both call "data frames", 5. in python, this is most commonly done using the pandas library, which is pervasive in the python data science / engineering world.

Once you've gotten to that point, you'll be primed for new solutions to the new problems you now have, one of which is that pandas is old and pretty creaky and does some things in awkward and suboptimal ways that can be greatly improved upon with new iterations of the concept, like polars.

But if you don't have these problems, then the solution won't make much sense.

That's on you. If you want to become a data engineer and data scientist -- the two software positions most likely to use polars -- get learning. Or don't: learn it when you need it.