How to be Pythonic? Design a Query Language in Python

I gave a talk at PyAmsterdam today and it was a lovely community. I get the chance to answer some questions that have been puzzling me for a while. I ask people to vote for me on DirectPoll (first time trying it) so I know what the community thinks.

Is Pythonic a thing?

It is a questions that I have been thinking since I was a naive Python Data Scientist. “Why I can’t just do it in a for loop?” came through my mind all the time. Why we have to follow certain convention in coding? Is Pythonic a thing or just peer pressure.

Poll of Is Pythonic a Thing

Almost 90% of you things that it really is a thing. (35 votes)

Who like SQL?

For me, I am not a fan of SQL. Date back to my first data science job I was furious about writing thousand links of SQL just to get some aggregated results. Joining tables are not fun as mistakes can be made easily. As we are designing a new query language in TerminusDB, I want to know what people things about SQL.

Poll of Who like SQL

I am surprised that 70% of you like SQL! Hmmmmm… (38 votes)

Which one do you prefer?

During the time I was translating WOQLjs to WOQLpy I wonder what how shall I make the query building more “Pythonic”. What would Pythonistas prefer? Chainable calls like WOQLQuery().doctype("journey").label("Journey) or Pandas DataFrame style, multi-parameters calls like WOQLQuery().doctype(id="journey, label="Journey"). (I failed to show the result in the talk so here you go!)

Poll of Which one do you prefer

Since Pandas, the most popular data manipulation library in Python uses the multi-parameters calls, I am not surprised that 80% of you would prefer that. (25 votes)


If you have missed the talk, you can now watch it here. If you want to catch me streaming live, follow me on Twitch.




After having a career as a Data Scientist and Developer Advocate, Cheuk dedicated her work to the open-source community. She has co-founded Humble Data, a beginner Python workshop that has been happening around the world. She has served the EuroPython Society board for two years and is now a fellow and director of the Python Software Foundation.