# How to know if a package is good?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-know-if-a-package-is-good/82133>\
**Category:** Community\
**Created:** [June 1, 2022, 11:41am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-know-if-a-package-is-good/82133 "2022-06-01T11:41:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 102

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**Author:** ![cjdoris](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/cjdoris/32/213133_2.png) [@cjdoris](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/cjdoris)\
**Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 11:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-know-if-a-package-is-good/82133/102 "2022-06-09T11:38:26Z")

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> [@patrick](#):
>
> I feel it would be good if people teaching undergraduates could standardize on a few simple packages that are easy to use and bug free

I have been wondering if there is some value in a data loading library which brings together a bunch of other packages under one API. For example you could have

```julia
load_table(DataFrame, "some/file.csv")

```

which loads the given file as a `DataFrame` (or whatever table type you like) and it understands many formats (CSV, TSV, various JSON formats, Parquet, ARFF, etc, etc, could even uncompress things too for you).

Similarly `load_matrix` (CSV, binary, numpy, etc) and `load_unstructured` (JSON, Serialisation, YAML, etc).

It would have some limited options, but not much, instead pointing you at other libraries.

This targets the “I just want to get a smallish table loaded without worrying about the format” niche.

Would this add value, or just be the N+1th package for data loading?

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