[rich_sasha]

I almost fully agree. I would add that Pandas API is poorly thought through and full of footguns.

Where I certainly disagree is the "frame as a dict of time series" setting, and general time series analysis.

The feel is also different. Pandas is an interactive data analysis container, poorly suited for production use. Polars I feel is the other way round.

[thelastbender12]

I think that's a fair opinion, but I'd argue against it being poorly thought out - pandas HAS to stick with older api decisions (dating back to before data science was a mature enough field, and it has pandas to thank for much of it) for backwards compatibility.

[ohyoutravel]

Well this is like saying Python must maintain backwards compatibility with Python 2 primitives for all time. It’s simply not true. It’s not easy to deprecate an old API, but it’s doable and there are playbooks for it. Pandas is good, I’ve used it extensively, but agree it’s not fit for production use. They could catch up to the state of the art, but that requires them being very opinionated and willing to make some unpopular decisions for the greater good.

[cruffle_duffle]

Why though? polars sounds like the rewrite! It’s okay to cycle into a new library. Let pandas do its thing and polars slowly take over as new projects overtake. There is nothing wrong with this and it happens all the time.

Like jquery, which hasn’t fundamentally changed since I was a wee lad doing web dev. They didn’t make major changes despite their approach to web dev being replaced by newer concepts found on angular, backbone, mustache, and eventually react. And that is a good thing.

What I personally don’t want is something like angular that basically radically changed between 1.0 and 2.0. Might as well just call 2.0 something new.

Note: I’ve never heard of polars until this comment thread. Can’t wait to try it out.

[ptman]

3.0 is the perfect place to break compat

[sirfz]

I think that's a sane take. Indeed, I think most data analysts find it much easier to use pandas over polars when playing with data (mainly the bracket syntax is faster and mostly sensible)