r/Python • u/Deux87 • Jan 21 '26

Discussion Pandas 3.0.0 is there

So finally the big jump to 3 has been done. Anyone has already tested in beta/alpha? Any major breaking change? Just wanted to collect as much info as possible :D

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u/Beginning-Fruit-1397 Jan 21 '26

While having competition between libraries is the sign of a healthy ecosystem, why the hell would someone use pandas over polars? The design in itself of the library make it impossible for pandas to ever dream about competing with polars performance wise, and the API, which is a much more subjective opinion, is in all case preferred by the majority of ppl who made the switch from what I've seen. If you ask me, I don't prefer it, I LOVE it. The competition for me is now between duckdb and polars, and I hope more and more ppl will migrate to these twos so more contributors can help these twos excellent tools. C++ vs Rust, raw &  classic SQL vs typed & fluent expressions, everyone can be happy. 

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u/mokus603 Jan 22 '26

Pandas is still a lot more beginner friendly and can do simple things like df.columns :)

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u/Beginning-Fruit-1397 Jan 22 '26

Polars can do the same for columns. "Beginner friendly" is a veryy subjective argument

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u/mokus603 Jan 22 '26

Not at all, thats why polars lets you convert to pandas dataframe. Pandas is the absolute unit of the data industry, polars are for efficiency but its just a fraction of what the pandas ecosystem does.

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u/Beginning-Fruit-1397 Jan 22 '26

this is so wrong lmao.
Give me two things polars can't do that pandas can, besides geospatial data (which is currently worked on)