Perhaps more than any other person, McKinney has helped fix that problem. McKinney is the developer of “Pandas”, one of the main tools used by data analysts working in the popular programming language Python.

Millions of people around the world use Pandas. In October 2017 alone, Stack Overflow, a website for programmers, recorded 5 million visits to questions about Pandas from more than 1 million unique visitors. Data scientists at Google, Facebook, JP Morgan, and virtually every other major company that analyze data uses Pandas. Most people haven’t heard of it, but for many people who do heavy data analysis—a rapidly growing group these days—life wouldn’t be the same without it. (Pandas is open source, so it’s free to use.)

Wes McKinney. So what does Pandas do that is so valuable? I asked McKinney how he explains it to non-programmer friends. “I tell them that it enables people to analyze and work with data who are not expert computer scientists,” he says. “You still have to write code, but it’s making the code intuitive and accessible. It helps people move beyond just using Excel for data analysis.”

Basically, Pandas makes it so that data analysis tasks that would have taken?50 complex lines of code in the past now only take 5 simple lines, because McKinney already did the heavy lifting.