The curly brackets you don’t have to use in the Query.jl case. They simplify a couple of scenarios a lot, but if you want you can also just use plain old vanilla syntax for named tuples instead.
The use of macros in Query.jl is pretty simple: to the user they really just look like functions. So, yes, a couple more @ appear in the code, but I don’t think they actually show up in syntactically difficult positions (or at least I hope so).
Where may I find @linq?
I’m pretty happy with LightQuery right now; an alternative to consider.
@linq lives in DataFramesMeta. But DataFrames now has transform in Base that is very robust. Combined with Pipe.jl I think it’s almost a drop-in replacement.
Agreed. Transform with Pipe.jl really comes to life. I want to mention a new framework for some syntactic sugar around the basic transform/combine commands in DataFrame:
https://github.com/matthieugomez/DataFramesMacros.jl
Hope this is helpful to someone.