FireDucks: Pandas but Faster

It's a bit sad for me. I find the biggest issue for me with pandas is the API, not the speed.

So many foot guns, poorly thought through functions, 10s of keyword arguments instead of good abstractions, 1d and 2d structures being totally different objects (and no higher-order structures). I'd take 50% of the speed for a better API.

I looked at Polars, which looks neat, but seems made for a different purpose (data pipelines rather than building models semi-interactively).

To be clear, this library might be great, it's just a shame for me that there seems no effort to make a Pandas-like thing with better API. Maybe time to roll up my sleeves...

Have you examined siuba at all? It promises to be more similar to the R tidyverse, which IMHO has a much better API. And I personally prefer dplyr/tidyverse to Polars for exploratory analysis.

https://siuba.org

I have not yet used siuba, but would be interested in others' opinions. The activation energy to learn a new set of tools is so large that I rarely have the time to fully examine this space...