This actually looks like Excel / 1-2-3, which is an array-based programming language that people look down on because it enables non-experts to build programs and therefore the programs are bad.
I don’t remember enough APL, so my examples are K:
Maximum subarray sum: |/(0|+)\
Flatten: ,//
Rank: <<
In these examples, every single character is its own operation, and they compose to give another useful operation.
Any Turing complete language can express what any other Turing complete language can (by definition). And pandas/r do provide APL’s vector and matrix operations. But not the composability, which IMHO is just as important to what this family brings to the table.
No doubt APL-likes are much nicer than pandas but in terms of operations, I belive they support the same operations.
/ is an operator. It's similar to functools.reduce.
,/ is a function, not dissimilar to pd.concat, ,/x is pd.concat(x) which is a little weird. It's tricky, but not impossible to implement functools.reduce(lambda x,y: pd.concat([y,x]), x) but I might've gotten the order of the arguments wrong.
,// is also a function. I think you can do pd.concat(x).values.flatten(), but this obviously doesn't compose. I don't see how you can implement it with another functools.reduce but maybe functools.reduce operates on dataframes after all, so maybe it's just functools.reduce(lambda x,y: pd.concat([y,x.values.flatten()]), functools.reduce(lambda x,y: pd.concat([y,x]), x)) but I have no idea: pd.concat(x).values.flatten() is shorter so I can't imagine anyone would prefer trying to make this monstrosity work.
Being "much nicer" is everything. If the syntax, and the rules for the syntactic elements means nothing, and you are fine with merely the ability to write the transformations, then you haven't thought about this clearly: VB6 is the same as Pandas since it too supports the same operations (or they can be implemented, as they can be in any turing-complete, and many non-turing-complete languages), but I find this line of thinking quite insulting: Pandas is much better for data programming than VB6, and whether you know it (or like it) or not, APL and their ilk are much better than Pandas for data programming.
Now, granted, I can see how R is perceived as inelegant, but I strongly believe that this is driven by unfamiliarity (for many people).