I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I may be completely off the mark but: Pandas, like SQL, feels like it doesn't compose very well. If you know some basic programming language — including Basic! — you've got a set of building blocks that let you, at least in principle, implement any algorithm. But in Pandas (and SQL) everything needs a new keyword or method or something. We need a better way of expressing high-level concepts, but if I knew what that was, I'd be a high-flying professor somewhere, not an anonymous commenter on HN!