alt Hacker NewsAt my work I had convinced the ML pipeline engineers to switch from pandas to polars for even small ETL pipelines and there were notable performance gain with better CPU/memory utilization.
If a library is performant at large datasets, it is likely performant at small ones too.
I’m not disagreeing with that statement at all. You missed my point that there are thousands of people making small Python scripts for education and personal projects everyday. In those circumstances the performance concerns are irrelevant and the ergonomics of good pandas documentation and community knowledge make it a better choice.