For lots of good reasons data-8 has, as I understand, always relied on Berkeley's own datascience package which offers far more intuitive/pythonic syntax to pandas. While I agree with all the pedagogical justification there relative to pandas, as you all probably know there are now much more performant and pythonic alternatives displacing pandas dominance, specifically polars and ibis.

I think these provide a syntax that is closer to datascience than pandas, and is more nicely aligned with and informed by database theory (and indeed can be translated directly to SQL). I know this wouldn't be a small overhaul, but I think it could be a substantial improvement.

Maybe it would make more sense to migrate data100 from pandas to polars first?