Pandas or PyData discussion groups besides this?

[John E]

Hi everyone,

Just checking again, are there any good places to discuss pandas at an intermediate to high user level?

This group is pretty much dead, unfortunately.  There is a developer list and github for (obv) developers.  And there is stackoverflow for very narrow and specific programming questions.

But to my knowledge, there remains no place for general discussion except here, but almost none of the developers nor the high volume stack overflow posters hang out here, so... <crickets>

Anyway, just asking and am appreciative of all the devs do, and I continue to love pandas.  I just wish there was someplace like this, but, you know, with activity.

Thanks,

John

[John E]

Let's bump it just once...

So I got some helpful answers to my other question posted at about the same time, so I suppose this is less dead than I thought, but I still get the sense that pandas developers don't really pay attention to this, nor most of the high-volume stack overflow posters, but obviously there are some smart people here.

It just seems unfortunate to me that there is basically no place for general, high level pandas discussions of the sort that don't really fit on the developer mailing list or stack overflow.  It seems like Julia, R, etc. all have such a thing and I really wish there was something like that for pandas.

My sneaking suspicion is many of the developers are happing to just discuss things on pandas github or the panda developers mailing list but those are really not good places for general discussions.  And don't get me wrong, I know from interactions with them at github or here (years ago) that many of them are great people but github and the dev list are not meant for general discussions.

Anyway, very curious if others have thoughts about this (like "stop whining!"  ;-) or suggestions for improving this.

[Jonathan Gutow]

John,

I do not think you are 'whining'. You are correct that the traffic on this list is rather thin. I still think people are watching and reading it, when messages come through it. I believe the low traffic stems from the relative maturity of Pandas. The API is quite stable and the documentation has been refined over the years. The stability of the project means that for things that are not available in the documentation a web search will often turn up a solution that was discussed previously. Thus people will only come to this list with questions if they did not find an answer elsewhere or they want to reach the larger community of people using Pandas.

Happy computing!

Jonathan

[John E]

Thanks, Jonathan!  I agree with a lot of what you say although I think pandas is far from mature.  Yes, compared to a few years ago it has improved a lot but if you compared it to stuff like R & Stata there is still plenty of room for more improvement -- not that I am complaining because no language is perfect for data munging & analysis.

Also, the big thing I find missing is a place to discuss, say, general approaches to solving problems with pandas. Those types of questions aren't appropriate at SO or github or the developer list. I remain befuddled at the lack of that sort of discussion group that every other language seems to have (R, Julia, Stata, SAS, etc.).  But it does look like this group has a lot more lurkers than I realized so I'll try to ask some general questions here in the future and see what happens ;-)