Fringe
This page is experimental. Here we collect the fringe public comments related to data.table, in date order. Fringe in the sense of peripheral or extreme but also subtle. These can often go quietly viral and gently sway a community over time. For those for who English is not their first language, sarcasm and jest are powerful tools sometimes on display here. We have always added all articles we are aware of to the articles page if they merely mention data.table (whether positive or negative) and will continue to do so. Even so, the sentiment of the articles page is overwhelming positive. The goal of this fringe page is to collect public comments (anything that is not an article, since that belongs on the articles page) with a bias towards the negative to aid potential new users in their quest to build a full unbiased picture of the data.table package.
24 Mar 2017 @statquant on Twitter
@MattDowle is up to another bloody benchmark, #python stocks are tumbling down
The word "bloody" is used in a negative connotation to convey that benchmarking is not appreciated by them. After the comma is sarcasm. It is a jibe. Anyway, if you ever need row-wise recursive updates within group, then take a look at the S.O. answer which shows how to reduce 19.2s to 0.27s using data.table together with Rcpp. My question was answered and here is how to do similar in Python.
25 Dec 2014 Hadley Wickham on Hacker News
Data tables are extremely fast but I think their concision makes it harder to learn and code that uses it is harder to read after you've written it. It's very reminiscent of APL.
Our response: See the hacker news item and comparing dplyr to data.table on Stack Overflow.
The word reminiscent was used to convey the notion of-the-past and is meant as criticism.
26 Jun 2014 Hadley Wickham on Stack Overflow
Also read.csv() reads everything into a big character matrix and then modifies that, does fread() do the same thing? In fastread we guess column types and then coerce as we go to avoid a complete copy of the df.
The Stack Overflow question is "Reason behind speed of fread in data.table package in R" and an implicit compliment to data.table. That's the context. The comment starts by asking a question which is already clear in the answer: "notice that [fread] skips straight to the middle and the end of the file to make a much better guess of the column types (although in this case the top 5 were enough)." Asking that question is a subtle way to i) create doubt about fread and ii) announce his new fastread package which had not been known before that. fastread subsequently became readr.
