Le dimanche 21 février 2016 à 13:10 -0800, Shahbaz Chaudhary a écrit : > 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. I'm not sure what you base your impression on, but I'm not sure it's an accurate description (see below). Anyway, two (o more) different APIs can perfectly coexist.
> 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. I think your feeling about a high-level API inspired by SQL is shared by many of the developers involved with data frames and data analysis in Julia. DataFrames can be one of the multiple backends which could be manipulated using a common API similar to C#'s LINQ or to R's dplyr. Things are still not settled, but you can have a look at this package: https://github.com/JuliaStats/DataFramesMeta.jl Also see this thread: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-dev/jL2FSL4EneE/c8vW8pdEqjYJ Help is of course more than welcome in the area of database support! Regards
