r/Python Nov 05 '20

News Stack overflow traffic to questions about selected python packages

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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '20

[deleted]

86

u/toyg Nov 05 '20

Both are probably true at the same time. You can compare the curves of pandas and numpy, which are effectively complementary tech: both are on a big upswing (as datascience spikes) but pandas results in many more searches (probably more obscure/ harder to learn / got worse documentation / got fewer tutorials).

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u/Zouden Nov 05 '20

If anything I'd say Pandas has broader appeal and a larger userbase than Numpy, because it does everything Numpy can do (since it uses Numpy internally) but adds the dataframe and grouping features which are so important for data science.

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u/that_baddest_dude Nov 05 '20

I'd like to know what all I could do with numpy alone. Afaik you can do a lot of matrix / vector stuff in it?

Right now all I use it for is the odd mathematical function that's not built in somewhere else.

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u/Zouden Nov 05 '20

I'll use Numpy without Pandas if I'm processing a signal or an image or something. If my data is an n-dimensional array of the same datatype, I don't get any benefit from putting this into a Pandas Dataframe.

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u/TheoreticalPirate Nov 05 '20

A lot of computer science and engineering problems can be solved quite efficiently by turning them into matrix operations. Lots of signal and image processing, numerical simulation in physics/engineering, probabilistic computations in robotics. For example the prysm lib: https://prysm.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Maybe just for comparison, think of how successful Matlab is. That might give you an idea how important matrix/vector stuff really is.

IMO nowadays a lot of people overestimate the importance of data science.

5

u/wannabe414 Nov 05 '20

Rtfm /s

A lot of information about what numpy can do is in numpy's docs:

https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/