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Root is definitely the backbone of a ton of work done in experimental particle physics but it is also the nightmare of new graduate students. It's affectively engrained into particle physics and I don't expect that to change anytime soon

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It is not that bad now with pyroot (ROOT python interface) and uproot being an option that is easy to learn for new graduate students. The problem is about legacy code which they usually have to maintain as part of experiment service

I can’t count the number of of times where a beginner did some stuff in pyroot that was horrifically slow and just implementing the exact same algorithm in C++ was two orders of magnitude faster.

If you don’t use RDataFrame, or it’s just histogram plotting, be very careful with pyroot.

You should be using RDataFrame though, or awkward + dask.

+1 for RDataFrame for what it can do. Just be prepared to bail to C++ and for loops when you exceed what it can do without major headaches.

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