Dataframes #programming #python
Dateframes are the spreadsheets of [Python] programming:
- It is a simple, yet versatile concept
- People who learn them really like to use them
- Their usage makes me uneasy, in a hard-to-articulate way
- They are easy to use inefficiently¹
- It is easy to make hard-to-spot mistakes with large consequences²
¹ Say you have a dataframe of records, and you also have some values from somewhere else. How to store the values? Put them in a dataframe! Now you have two dataframes. How to look up a value for each record? Do a filter on the second dataframe. Now you have #R*#V running time.
² Say you have a dataframe of records and some values in another dataframe. To avoid going through all values for every record, you store the records and the values in the same order, now you can simply index into the value dataframe. Say you need to filter or sort the records somehow, now you have to remember to filter and sort the value dataframe in exactly the same way.
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