I had the privilege of speaking today at Rice at Hadley Wickham's (of R fame) invitation. I talked broadly about the problems faced in structured data manipulation problems and how I've worked to address them in pandas. I enjoyed speaking with Hadley (whom I'd never met before in person) about these problems as we've come up with nice solutions to many of them independently, and in different languages (R and Python, respectively). A lot of folks assume that parts of pandas are inspired by his plyr and reshape2 packages, but I've only started playing around with them recently. I think we all have a lot we can learn from each other on the road toward building even better high performance, easy-to-use, and expressive data manipulation tools.