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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure how useful this 5 year old article is. I stopped following the SciRuby project a long time ago

The DaRu (Ruby DataFrame) sub-project's last commit it around a year ago, but the daru-view sub-project (visualization and plotting for web apps) seems to be maintained and updated frequently:

https://github.com/SciRuby/daru

https://github.com/SciRuby/daru-view

While I like Ruby's syntax and community, it is really hard to compete with in high-level scientific programming market when you are competing against Python, R & Julia (and Mathematica and MatLab).

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(author here) Me neither! Don't know how or why it suddenly appeared on the HN main :)

Just to provide a bit of the personal context: this article caused creator of DaRu (Sameer Deshmukh) to contact me and propose to work on DaRu together, and so I did (see @zverok here: https://github.com/SciRuby/daru/graphs/contributors). I also was, for some time, SciRuby/DaRu's mentor for Google Summer of Code (and, IIRC, it was my initial idea that daru-view grew from).

Also, since that article, an independent dataframe library https://github.com/ankane/rover was created by Andrew Kane, handling some of API and implementation in a cleaner way.

That being said, I am not sure that DaRu, or Rover (or "dataframe" idea in general) has enough visibility in the Ruby community. It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing", while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes.

That's what I'd focus this article on if I'd written it today.

> , while I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes.

And I add that just the datatype is not enough, because is "this close" to be the foundation for relational programming (p.d: I'm building a relational language where you can say everything is alike data-frames/relations: https://tablam.org).

> It is mostly thought as "some special scientific thing"

This is part of the problem, truly. Being so focused on "science" when I think is better to frame it as data manipulation like you do in SQL tables/views, making it much more general than is used for...

Thank you for the update.

> I believe in 2021 it should be seen as one of the necessary everyday high-level datatypes.

I agree. It is one of those data structures that developers tend to use by reimplementing badly using arrays/lists and dictionarys, usually even unaware that they are doing so.

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