Pandas: Meet Wes McKinney, the man behind the most important tool in data science -- Quartz

Pandas: Meet Wes McKinney, the man behind the most important tool in data science -- Quartz

"But Python was missing some key features that would make it a good language for data analysis. For example, it was challenging to import CSV files (one of the most common formats for storing datasets). It also didn't have an intuitive way of dealing with spreadsheet-like datasets with rows and columns, or a simple way to create a new column based on existing columns.

"Pandas addressed these problems. David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, explained the importance of it in technical terms. 'The idea of treating in memory data like you would a SQL table is incredibly powerful,' he says. 'By introducing the 'DataFrame,' Pandas made it possible to do intuitive analysis and exploration in Python that wasn't possible in other languages like Java. And is still not possible.'"