Skip to content

Comment on Matlab, R, and Julia: Languages for data analysis

Comments

Personally I'm in love with R's data.frame. It allows very concise, robust and elegant manipulation and subsetting of a data set.

I wish every language would have such a built-in object type, I definitely feel its loss when I manipulate data in other languages such as Javascript or Mathematica.

> Personally I'm in love with R's data.frame. It allows very concise, robust and elegant manipulation and subsetting of a data set.

The performance is terrible though. For data of more than ~10,000 observations SQL is much better performance wise, is more robust, and is as good at subsetting. Although it's maybe not as elegant for everyone's definition of elegant.

What dataframe operations do you find to be slow? Usually I'm able to get huge performance wins by rewriting my slow R code in a loop free way (*apply and friends).

If you haven't tried it, the data.table package is great. Mostly like a data.frame (in fact a subclass), but fast.

Python acquired that capability with Pandas in the last two years. Same nomenclature, tens of times faster.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.