The basic version of pandas was built in 2008 by Wes McKinney, an MIT grad with heavy quantitative finance experience. Now a celebrity in his own right, thanks to his open source contributions and the wildly popular book called Data Analysis with Python, he was reportedly frustrated with the time he had to waste doing simple data manipulation tasks at his job, such as reading a CSV file, with the popular tools at that time. He said he quickly fell in love with Python for its intuitive and accessible nature after not finding Excel and R suitable for his needs. But he found that it was missing key features that would make it the go-to tool for data analysis—for example, an intuitive format to deal with spreadsheet data or to create new calculated columns from existing columns.
According to an interview he gave to Quartz, the design considerations and vision...