Docstrings are one thing, but functionality discovery, picking up from scratch, troubleshooting, etc are... not fun, nor easy with the documentation. If you know it well already and use it a lot it's easier to forgive its documentation faults since you can waive off the problems as "that's just learning something new".

But for a lot of people who use it infrequently its documentation is a frustrating mess. Simple problems turn into significant time sinks of trying to find which page of the documentation to look at.

A lot of issues are made worse by shit-awful interop between libraries that claim to fully support dayaframes, but often fail in non-obvious ways... meaning back to the documentation mines.

I'd argue that because there's a market for a single author to write two books about it is indicative of documentation problems.

Fair enough. I'm highly biased and my recent book is the most popular Pandas book currently, so it is evidence that folks prefer opinionated documentation.

However, I always though the 10 minutes to Pandas page was decent for getting started. I picked up Polars recently and thought it was more difficult than Pandas because there wasn't any quick intro docs. What projects have great introductory docs for you?

Also, I am curious to learn more about the specifics of interop libraries you are referring to.

Learning a new tool is generally a challenge. I think another challenge with a lot of data tools is that non-programmers tend to be the major audience. I make my living teaching "non-programmers" how to use these tools.

That said, I always teach "go to the docstrings and stay in your environment (to not break flow) if you can." The pydata docstrings are better than most, including Python (the language).

Yeah, I think for your audience, pandas makes total sense! When I first started using it, it was through an ambitiously large project with tons of gaps in data, untype-able text for 1% of rows, didn't fit in memory.. etc. So my personal experience is a bit tainted by putting myself through a hell that could have solved sooner by spending more time learning instead of bashing my keyboard with a hammer.