Wes McKinney - Leveling Up the Data Stack: Thoughts on the Last 15 Years
Wes McKinney’s talk on YouTube delivers a deep retrospective on the evolution of data science tools over the last 15 years, focusing on key projects including Pandas, Apache Arrow, and their implications for future software development. McKinney kicks off by addressing how Python’s role has expanded in statistical computing, and he notes a contrast to R’s established ecosystem. The primary concern he raises from his early career is fragmentation in the Python ecosystem.