Dear Shahbaz, Welcome to Julia. Various data manipulation tools will cater to various needs/individuals. Sounds like you might be interested in the various projects developed by the JuliaDB organization: https://github.com/JuliaDB Other people need or like to use DataFrames. In my work I often find that native arrays and .csv reading and writing does the job.
All the best, Ben On Monday, February 22, 2016 at 10:55:05 AM UTC-5, Shahbaz Chaudhary wrote: > > I'm pretty new to Julia and only have marginally more experience with R so > please excuse me if I don't understand something basic. > > According to Julia's website, the final api/syntax for manipulating data > has not been finalized yet, although the momentum seems to be moving > towards a dataframe style api. > > Since Julia is still a new language, doesn't it make sense to base the > model on something closer to the relational algebra/sql/list > comprehensions? I realize these three are not synonyms for each other, but > relational algebra is supposed to have a more rigorous mathematical > foundation in building the primitives used to manipulate data. SQL now has > decades of use and has unarguably democratized data manipulation (I've seen > lawyers and traders use sql, who would never use a full blown programming > language). > > At least R's dataframe feel extremely clunky, although I'll admit that I > may be missing something fundamental since Julia/Spark/Pandas seem to be > adopting this model instead of the relational model. > > A language, built from the ground up to process datasets should have a > more intuitive syntax. > > One potential issue is that relational algebra/sql don't handle ordered > data well. I don't know enough about recent advances but surely an > extension to relational primitives is more sound than adapting dataframes. > > Frankly I'm curious to learn from the more experienced here what I'm not > understanding about dataframes and why they are so popular. > > >
