I'm pretty new to Julia and only have marginally more experience with R so please excuse me if I don't understand something basic.
According to Julia's website, the final api/syntax for manipulating data has not been finalized yet, although the momentum seems to be moving towards a dataframe style api. Since Julia is still a new language, doesn't it make sense to base the model on something closer to the relational algebra/sql/list comprehensions? I realize these three are not synonyms for each other, but relational algebra is supposed to have a more rigorous mathematical foundation in building the primitives used to manipulate data. SQL now has decades of use and has unarguably democratized data manipulation (I've seen lawyers and traders use sql, who would never use a full blown programming language). At least R's dataframe feel extremely clunky, although I'll admit that I may be missing something fundamental since Julia/Spark/Pandas seem to be adopting this model instead of the relational model. A language, built from the ground up to process datasets should have a more intuitive syntax. One potential issue is that relational algebra/sql don't handle ordered data well. I don't know enough about recent advances but surely an extension to relational primitives is more sound than adapting dataframes. Frankly I'm curious to learn from the more experienced here what I'm not understanding about dataframes and why they are so popular.
