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Comment by jphoward | Hacker News Reader

What I think would be a nice approach would be someone creating a new Dataframe class that merely inherits from a Pandas dataframe but just implementing .filter(), .summarise(), .select() etc. as methods, using the dplyr syntax. If they return their own dataframes then chaining follows naturally.

I know that isn't how dplyr works, but it feels more Pythonic, and this solution isn't entirely analogous to dplyr anyway.

This approach seems a little complicated, though I'm sure with some use I could learn to enjoy it.

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Hey, author of siuba here, I totally agree that subclassing would be a natural choice in python. One challenge there is that users will often get a DataFrame back (e.g. from pd.read_csv), so it requires a lot of casting to the child class.

Right now, a compromise I've been exploring is just attaching siuba's DF functions to a pandas DataFrame, e.g. df.siu_mutate(...). This seems to be what pandas wants people to do [1]! One obstacle here is that the DataFrame has 300+ methods, which can be overwhelming to learners.

I've spent a lot of time wondering whether the piping syntax feels like too much vs chaining. It's still an open question in my mind, so it's really helpful to hear what feels most natural!

https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/development/ext...

All good points! Great work on the project and thank you for working to make Pandas more friendly!

What about monkey patching the class at runtime?

Edit: oh that's pretty much what the linked decorators do.

> What I think would be a nice approach would be someone creating a new Dataframe class that merely inherits from a Pandas dataframe but just implementing .filter(), .summarise(), .select() etc. as methods, using the dplyr syntax. If they return their own dataframes then chaining follows naturally. > I know that isn't how dplyr works, but it feels more Pythonic, and this solution isn't entirely analogous to dplyr anyway.

I think I agree. Pandas has a lot of overhead/baggage that I don't want 90% of the time. Being able to chain _simple_ verbs on a data frame would be great -- something like mtcars.groupby(cyl).summarize(avg_hp = hp.mean())

I'm still debating chaining vs piping, but you can do..

  from siuba import _
  from siuba.data import mtcars
  
  # mtcars is a pandas DataFrame

  mtcars \
    .groupby("cyl") \
    .siu_summarize(avg_hp=_.hp.mean())

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