[aphyr]

You're right, that is longer! I get why though; `filter` is a clojure.core function name people don't necessarily feel comfortable shadowing, and the Clojure and Spark versions make it clear what's a symbol in local scope versus a field in the dataset. I don't think it'd be hard to make a little wrapper for this sort of thing though! Here's an example which turns any symbols not in local scope into field lookups on an implicit row variable.

    (require '[clojure.walk :refer [postwalk]])

    (defmacro filter
      [ds & anaphoric-pred]
      (let [row-name (gensym 'row)
            pred     (postwalk (fn [form]
                                 (if (and (symbol? form) (nil? (resolve form)))
                                   `(get ~row-name ~(str form))
                                   form))
                       anaphoric-pred)]
      `(tc/select-rows ds (fn [~row-name] ~@pred))))

Now you can write

    (filter ds (> year 2008))

And it'll expand to the ts form:

    (pprint (macroexpand '(filter ds (> year 2008))))
    => (tc/select-rows ds (fn [row2411] (> (get row2411 "year") 2008)))