pandas 3.0.0 released
19 points by ngoldbaum
19 points by ngoldbaum
Looks like pandas is slowly converging towards polars with the dedicated string type and pd.col.
Unfortunately NumPy grew support for variable-width string arrays juuuust too late for that to be useful for Pandas. But it works out in the end and it’s no real skin off my neck if the main original reason for writing StringDType was obviated. Hopefully it’ll be useful elsewhere in the ecosystem.
As a side note: The pull request for pd.col was created by Marco Gorelli, a core-developer of both polars and pandas.
Marco briefly discusses this with Wes McKinney (creator of pandas) and Michael Chow in this recent podcast episode (position ~13m55s): https://posit.co/thetestset/episode/marco-gorelli-narwhals-ecosystem-glue-and-the-value-of-boring-work/