A few differences in my day to day life that come to mind (in no particular order):
- not having to specify the
data.table name over and over (leading to clumsy syntax and silly mistakes) in expressions (on the flip side I sometimes miss the TAB-completion of names)
- much faster and very intuitive
by operations
- no more frantically hitting Ctrl-C after typing
df, forgetting how large df was (also leading to almost never using head)
- faster and better file reading with
fread
- the package also provides a number of other utility functions, like
%between% or rbindlist that make life better
- faster everything else, since a lot of
data.frame operations copy the entire thing needlessly
