How NOT to write pandas code

towardsdatascience.com

14 pointsHIP_HOP4 comments

I've never seen a Pandas tutorial advocating the for-loops the author describes and I have rarely come across for-loops in other people's Pandas code. I think the article could remove the for-loop "how not to" examples and it would be a typical "getting started with Pandas" article.

Obviously nobody would advocate for them. But for a new Pandas programmer, loops are incredibly obvious, familiar, and do work. So, tons of people use them.

The title is a bit clickbaity, so here’s a TL;DR:

Try to use the built-in vectorized Pandas functions instead of writing explicit loops.

It's wild how much faster iterrows and itertuples are. I wish I'd known a year ago.

This is one of those cases that really isn't just pedantic, "pythonic", nagging. It matters.

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