feat(api): add agg alias for aggregate

[cpcloud]

Add an agg alias for aggregate. I am really tired of typing out the entire word.

[jcrist]

👍

[github-actions]

Test Results

         6 files           6 suites   6m 39s ⏱️
  3 258 tests   3 232 ✔️   26 💤 0 ❌
19 494 runs  19 338 ✔️ 156 💤 0 ❌

Results for commit b26b139.

[jcmkk3]

Looks like you already merged this and I understand that agg has precedence in the pydata ecosystem, but I think that my favorite verb for this operation is rollup as used by arquero. I can no longer find the reference, but I'm sure that I remember Jeffrey Heer saying that the verbs came out of academic user studies done for data wrangler (which became Trifacta).

Beyond rollup evoking a better visual image of how the operation changes the data shape, it also happens to have a really nice visual alignment with some of the other common verbs.

t.rollup
t.select
t.mutate
t.filter

It is a slippery slope boxing yourself into trying to keep names the same length, of course.

Another shortened verb that has some precedence is sel for select as used in xarray.

I mostly just geek out about this stuff. Not proposing that you change your mind on any of these names.

[ogrisel]

Personally I prefer explicit full English words in APIs.

I also like the symmetry between aggregate and mutate.

Also, I tend to dislike aliases because then it breaks the community in term of programming style and the extra alternatives are confusing for newcomers.

[cpcloud]

Looks like you already merged this and I understand that agg has precedence in the pydata ecosystem, but I think that my favorite verb for this operation is rollup as used by arquero. I can no longer find the reference, but I'm sure that I remember Jeffrey Heer saying that the verbs came out of academic user studies done for data wrangler (which became Trifacta).

The only issue with rollup is that it has a very specific meaning to the business intelligence community: it's a special case of GROUP BY GROUPING SETS that is extremely common in BI workflows.

We have (the rather ancient!) #550 open for this functionality :)

Beyond rollup evoking a better visual image of how the operation changes the data shape, it also happens to have a really nice visual alignment with some of the other common verbs.

t.rollup
t.select
t.mutate
t.filter

It is a slippery slope boxing yourself into trying to keep names the same length, of course.

I definitely appreciate this, but, yeah it seems like it'll be a hard corner to get out of if we go down this route.

Another shortened verb that has some precedence is sel for select as used in xarray.

I mostly just geek out about this stuff. Not proposing that you change your mind on any of these names.

Not opposed to sel, but we should probably deprecate projection/to_projection before introducing another alias.

[cpcloud]

Personally I prefer explicit full English words in APIs.

I sympathize with this for sure: when writing pipelines being explicit made things easier to understand. There's probably an analogy (and a similar tension with iteration speed and convenience) with CI and production shell script arguments here.

I also like the symmetry between aggregate and mutate.

There's always the possibility of mut I guess :)

Also, I tend to dislike aliases because then it breaks the community in term of programming style and the extra alternatives are confusing for newcomers.

Yeah, I understand this too. The way we've currently been thinking about this is to pick a primary API and remove all references to the secondary API in documentation and tests but not actually remove the secondary API to avoid breaking existing code that uses it. Optionally we can add a deprecation warning if we actually do intend to remove it at some point.

[ogrisel]

There's always the possibility of mut I guess :)

Please no!